Is it just me, or can anyone else not scroll down to read the whole post on the iPad?
Fixed. Very sorry.
Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#32I went to their home page (http://www.thedaily.com/) and clicked on the link "Am I going to be billed automatically after the free period". It told me "The URL you requested could not be found."
So let's get their value proposition right. This is a paid news source, appallingly badly executed, that doesn't bring any value that I can't get from free news sources such as Reddit or the BBC or Guardian.
I predict it will sink without trace, after wasting millions of dollars.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#33"The iPhone and iPad have to work a lot harder to display JPEGs than they do to display the equivalent PNGs" That is a myth. It is the pixel format of the CGImage that matters, not the compression format of the source file. 32bpp premultiplied CGImages are the only format that the GPU will render natively as the contents of a CALayer. Since all JPEGs decode to 24bpp and most PNGs are saved as 32bpp, it's easy to see…
However PNG is much better than JPEG at rendering texts. So using JPEG for articles is ridiculous.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#34"The iPhone and iPad have to work a lot harder to display JPEGs than they do to display the equivalent PNGs" That is a myth. It is the pixel format of the CGImage that matters, not the compression format of the source file. 32bpp premultiplied CGImages are the only format that the GPU will render natively as the contents of a CALayer. Since all JPEGs decode to 24bpp and most PNGs are saved as 32bpp, it's easy to see…
The iPad (not sure about the iPhone) also has a JPEG hardware decoder. iOS 4.2 finally provided at least some level of access to this and it makes a huge difference.
Oh, that went public? I've been using it on the jailbreak side for ages :)
All devices back to the iPhone 3G at least have a hardware JPEG codec.
Re: Why "The Daily" is an Abomination (and how to fix it)
#35I've used the app a bit as well. At first I thought it was just design by committee, but I think that was wrong. It is probably closer to design by committee with a non-technical designer, followed by a development staff that never said no to any request. Either way, more effort was spent on 'cool factor' rather than usability.