Slate.com Reviews – Page 10
3/5 rating based on 417 reviews. Read all reviews for Slate.com for iPhone.
Slate.com is free iOS app published by The Slate Group, LLC
App is awful and full of bugs
ScorpioAnnie
I love Slate’s journalism, but this is one of the worst apps I’ve ever used. Causes my phone to overheat, crashes all the time, and now it won’t even refresh the feed. I’ll stick to reading from Safari, the app is so bad it’s unusable. After reading recent reviews, looks like I’m not the only one with these issues.
Horrible
NoSoCalFlake
I literally have a blank screen for all pages within the app. All I can do is log in. Yay. :(
Creepy tailored ads
Blatency
Ads tailored to search history outside the app are creepy. Deleted the app
Unusable. Major bug. 3x3 photo layout is poor. Font size too small. No customization.
AstroPaul
Discovered a major bug today. On an iPhone. If one wants to post a comment, one is taken to a log in screen. That’s fine, but if you change your mind, you’re stuck! Hit Cancel and the screen refreshes to the very same log in screen! The only way out is to Force-Quit the app. An obvious glitch—and poor design! Other issues. One version of this app is broken. It shows no headlines, articles, or opinion columns, but still shows ads! No version number is given under settings. The other version on my iPad (5.3.15) ridiculously shows a 3x3 grid of photos with bold cut-off headlines, which is hard to process and renders the app unusable. There is no way of changing the layout or font size. There are no global settings options. The left-hand drop down menu is a long one, but only shows a few entries at a time in a large, cartoonish font! Hard to scroll through! This new version also deletes ALL of your previously saved stories and articles! That's horrible design. The developers have violated the Hippocratic Software Oath, “First, do no harm!” Please give us an option to use the old interface and transfer our saved stories. Even worse, this new version litters stories with ads; plus, it puts a bunch of ads at the bottom of each article or column, many with grotesque images. Yech! At this point, I cannot see subscribing or contributing to Slate! Note: Oddly, the old version of the app still works fine on the iPod Touch and iPhone SE. But I won't be upgrading as it could destroy what is working well! —————— Here's my earlier review. Slate provides wonderful articles and columns -- a progressive Atlantic or New Yorker. The info, topics, and writers are good. The app, though, needs major work. It also behaves quite differently on the iPad vs. the iPod Touch and iPhone. The 5.3.15 one, which seems to be the latest, has fixed several problems ON THE IPAD, although it has introduced others: There are NO options or settings in the pull-down menu; oddly, its general font size controls are INSIDE of EACH story; and, unfortunately, it displays headlines in a large 3 x 3 block grid of photos + BOLDED words (w/o any article text) rather than the far more inviting scrolling list of smaller photos with headlines and first sentence or brief blurb on each article or column. PLEASE GIVE USERS THE OPTION TO DISPLAY A SCROLLING LIST OF HEADLINES, JUST THE WAY IT WORKS ON THE IPHONES. On the iPod Touch 6 and iPhone SE, version 5.3.15 is an absolute mess. The text for comments still remains far too small and the section interface remains poor, with the same problems that occur on the smaller i-devices! Here are the details. FONT PROBLEM ON IPHONES AND IPOD TOUCHES Even at the largest setting, the font size for stories is far too small to read comfortably. Users should NOT have to hold their devices right up to their eyeballs to read the stories! I have many other news apps and they all permit *much larger* font sizes. Please fix this! It should be adjustable to LARGE sizes on the iPhone and iPod Touch as it is on the iPad as users need or prefer. You have great material at Slate, and excellent columnists and news analysts, but the small font size is a HUGE barrier to reading such great content! It’s way past time that you provide users with bigger font size options. There are other font glitches, too. The spacing of text is often wrong on the iPhone, e.g., in lists of movie titles, they all run together! SECTIONS PROBLEM You still haven’t restored the slider-tab interface or g users with the ability to customize sections. * The tabbed section slider interface worked better. A year or two ago, you switched to a left-hand drop down menu, but it’s clumsy. The tabbed interface worked faster, looked cleaner, and made sections more accessible. So, please give users an option to restore that. * There is still NO customization of the drop down section list. It’s a long list, so it means scrolling to get to the section that one wants to read. We should be able to reorder the list and park our favorite columns or writers there. We always liked reading Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy, but he was hard to find — and now, alas, lost for good as he went elsewhere. * The stories in the 2 main sections, Recent and Popular, still overlap far too much! So much so, they are almost indistinguishable! Better culling is needed. COMMENTS PROBLEM Another big problem is that the text in comments is too tiny to read easily! That's true on the iPad as well as the iPhones and iPod Touches. Plus, you provide no way of making it bigger! NAVIGATION PROBLEM Navigation remains obscure on the smaller i-devices. The back arrow for returning to the headline list is hidden. There is a ghostly, barely visible banner at the top, and the back arrow is typically obscured. It should appear as it does on the iPad, a distinct, visible, white left arrow. AESTHETICS AND DISTRACTIONS The background photos and Big Ss behind each of the headlines on the iPhone and IPT interferes with the text and often make them hard to read! It also looks poor aesthetically. The Ss jump around when scrolling, so they are distracting to boot. They are completely unnecessary! Slate+ is an enhanced version of the offerings, but the FAQ doesn't explain what it is! Its stories often aren’t flagged clearly, either. In any case, please give us an option for a scrolling headline display on the iPad and fix the font size and section issues — as well as the other problems. Make sure that new version don't delete saved stories. Make sure that the app lives up to the quality of the magazine and site itself!
Slate Plus features don’t work
Hansisgreat
I very much enjoy Slate’s journalism, but the app is a complete gutterball. I paid to join Slate Plus because they promised the app would be free of advertising and I’d have access to exclusive content. The problem is the app doesn’t work, I’m unable to log in, so I’m still seeing ads and locked out of the Plus content. I wrote several times to tech support, and an agent told Zoe told me essentially nothing can be done and I have to live without the added content I paid for. Every time I opened the app I felt like a sucker who’d been cheated and then dismissed. I’ve since deleted the app.
Terrible app a barrier to good content
texnerd5813
When you sign in to Slate Plus the only way to leave that pop up is to hit the back button—which signs you back out. And the headlines are clipped to three lines, so you have to guess at what the article is actually about if it’s longer. Did anyone actually, you know, test this thing on iOS?
Slate is Great
maythisfindyouwell
Thoughtful, interesting, well written, informative. Especially good at background information.