This post has been a looong time coming but I was very lucky to be given an early beta release of the Sky news iPad app to have a play. Like most of the reviewers out there I have to agree – it’s pretty slick. It allows you to consume news in a linear manner, something that exists nowhere else on the Internet. News is fed to the app as it breaks but lingers on the timeline so one always has access to ‘old news’. It’s a weirdly better version of any one of the Rolling news channels because unlike watching the TV the app doesn’t have to pretend that news happens ALL the time. Instead it is 100% up to date when their is news but instead of bombarding you with dramatic shots of an empty police car or bananas time filling graphics it supplies you with just the sorties, in order, when they actually are stories.
On top of this it allows you to really interact with that news – a story you choose to focus on will be accompanied by historic pieces about the same issue, charts, tables, and graphs that catch you up on the background and elaborate on the content itself. I love this and weirdl it’s almost exactly the way I consume news : when something interesting is happening I piker hit up the news points, digest the stories and then fire up Wikipedia to know why all this is happening in the first place! The Sky News app has already done this for me! My only criticism of that aspect, and I understand it can’t be helped, but the supporting information has a HEAVY editorial feel so there is a sense of getting the broader Sky picture, not the actual broader picture.
The interface Itself is a piece of genius. News actually happens along a timeline which you swipe and swoosh to navigate. This tactile, minority report-esque control mechanism gives you wonderfully tangible sense of the sequence of the day. It presents then ewes exactly as it should be presented – according to the way it happened. Of course the order is edited and controlled toobutin the interface the editorial fist is much less obvious somehow. Politics aside it’s a really neat use of touch technology and a real triumph.
My only big beef with the app is that behaves much like time really does in that you are always looking at ALL the news. It is not yet intelligent enough to remember which stories you have read and ‘minimize’ them in the timeline until areal update occurs. Similarly it doesn’t learn anything about your news consuming habits so that it can tend to be a bit overwhelming looking at everything that has happened ever, at once. To be fair, these are complaints about features thati think are missing and that is not really fair : the features it does include are implemented With style and originality. Overall I think it’s a winner and an extremely strong first go at presenting rolling news in a new way on a new device with a new interface.