On Tuesday we’re releasing an replace to the BBC Information iPhone and iPad app within the UK designed to make the app quicker and extra steady, with larger, higher high quality photos on the house display screen.
We’re busy doing a little analysis and considering for the time being about what persons are searching for in our Information apps in the long term, however we thought that within the meantime, it was essential to repair one or two bugs affecting some customers of the prevailing app and to make it a greater, slicker expertise total.
We need to make sure that the present app stays a good way to get a fast overview of the highest tales throughout a variety of topics, easy-to-scan on a cellular and, as soon as the tales have loaded, helpful to learn offline too.
So, it’ll now be faster to begin up the app and to replace it, and it ought to really feel smoother and quicker as you scroll and swipe by way of the screens and tales.
The bigger homescreen photos we have launched serve two functions:
- first, you possibly can see what’s in them extra clearly and there is extra room for the headline
- second, their positioning makes it clearer that you would be able to scroll horizontally in every information class to disclose extra tales (we observed that in consumer testing some folks assumed there have been solely three tales a bit).
There’s a new format on iPad whenever you view the house display screen in portrait mode – designed to indicate extra headlines and make it simpler to seek out the tales you are fascinated about.
Among the many bugs that we have fastened is a matter that generally brought about the app to get caught when updating, and one other the place you generally noticed duplicate tales inside a single information class.
For our product group, these enhancements required a reasonably main transforming of the app’s code. The excellent news is that they’re now working from a extra steady base which could be constructed on with new options and performance. This revising of our code is one thing we have already achieved with our Android app, so we’ll now have the ability to launch upgrades concurrently on each iOS and Android, that are by far the biggest cellular platforms for us by way of customers. This newest replace is already out there internationally.
For those who’re a consumer of the app, or resolve to attempt it out, we hope you may just like the enhancements we have made. And as we take into consideration our apps typically and plan our subsequent steps, we would like to listen to about what you’d most prefer to see in future.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC Information web site.