CBC News iPhone app: A great start to deliver news
I am always cranky for the lack of a good news app for iPhone, specially a Canadian version. Guardian app seems to be a great news app but it's from UK and I prefer to read all my news in the same app with a great interface. There are some Canadian news app out there such as Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and Metro to name a few, but they are nothing more than RSS readers wrapped in a native app, some even doing a poor job on offline reading feature while there are a lot of great RSS readers out there doing way better than news apps I mentioned above. Spreed is one of the companies that provides white label and generic news app to news companies for mobile devices. Not that it's a bad platform per se, but I expect more from them than just-another-app-to-read-text-based-news. The features of mobile apps provided by news corporations that use such apps are as limited as the platforms they choose and therefore there's no competition other than their content when they use such solutions.
The features I look for in a good news app are at least having some multimedia and interactive features such as video, audio and covering at least one day worth of news! Many of news applications barely cover one day worth of news with the assumption that you check the app several times a day.
Enough introduction already. Today I came across an article in iPhoneInCanada.ca: "CBC News Releases New App". I downloaded the app and I have to tell, way to go CBC! Here's a list of noticeable features and what I like about CBC news app compared to others:
- Latest videos, broken down into different categories
- Broad news categories covered: Local news, National, Global, Business, Technology, etc.
- At the top of home screen, there's button that let's users listen to CBC World Report, World at Six and Hourly Edition which I found a great addition
- Local weather. Also you can add more cities for weather conditions
- Send News: you can submit news. Text, photo or video
- Being able to load more headlines than already loaded
There are some annoyances which I hope they fix in the future:
- Videos have poor quality for retina display
- Some bugs here and there like crashes, occasional slow loadings and occasional messed up headers
- No offline feature
- Periodic ad displayed at the bottom of the page is distracting and makes small area for news even smaller. They could at least put it above header or better yet, GET RID OF IT!
What do you think? Have you came across any good news app that you really like?