App, Server, And Stories Are Weak – TheJournal.ie News Review

Topic: App, Server, And Stories Are Weak This wouldn't be an entirely bad news service app, if only it didn't make it hard to actually use the service to read. I often dread opening the app, because I know what a multitude of pains I will have to endure when simply trying to read. Then, there are the issues of the news aggregators or superiors having an agenda and showing bias. More articles on tea are preferable to being lectured about some pet preference or new fangled cause of the moment. The best parts, though, are the Irish humor, history, culture, food, and the reader comments. However, articles all too often are un-inquisitive, incurious, uninformative, and leave out the basics. The news aggregators lack perspective on the needs of the readers for context and clarity, by delivering content which is vague and obtuse. For example, the news aggregators lazily use acronyms or shortened terms, while never bothering to give the full version. This is particularly egregious when a given acronym has more than one meaning (such as AIB). Even school kids know the first rule for acronyms: spell it out upon their first occurrence. I sometimes learn more from the comments than the articles. The app frequently crashes, resets to the first article if the user multitasks and goes to another app for a minute, constantly loses its place, goes back to the top of the list while reading farther down the list, often refuses to load the next 30 articles at all unless the user closes the app and starts afresh, opens pages slowly, stalls when scrolling down a page, renders page content slowly, sometimes won't load comments, and otherwise makes it hard to access articles to read. So, half or more of the user's time is spent just navigating. The app is decidedly unfriendly to impaired users. It actually discriminates against the vision impaired, because the app blocks the standard ability to highlight text. This matters to impaired users for two reasons: 1) It is not possible to use the text-to-speach function by the vision impaired. 2) Disallows highlighting even a single word at a time, when want to use the Define function. If the user copies an article's URL and wants to read it in a regular or internal browser, the app chooses to launch itself instead. Only by opening the URL two or three times in a row will the app stop interfering. That is very obnoxious, wastes time, and messes with the user's workflow. Thus, the app and servers need a serious overhaul, to improve the speed of content access. If there is an editor, please teach the newer writers the trade.
Review by Spiffy McDuffster on TheJournal.ie News.