The Sky News app for iPad represents a bold step for Sky, who should be praised for merely adapting their popular iPhone app for a bigger screen. It's fabulous to look at, slick to use and intuitive to boot, but questions remain about the content it is offering.
Sky has pumped huge investment into its apps, and the broadcast giant currently offers up some of the most impressive offerings in the Apple App Store.
And the Sky News app for iPhone will, for a while at least, represent one of the crown jewels of Sky's efforts in applications.
From the very first page it is clear that this is a big step in terms of the user interface. The Home screen offers a series of pictures of differing sizes, with the main story immediately being pushed to the forefront and the other stories spreading down the page.
These pictures represent the main stories of the day, and clicking on each on brings up what can probably be termed a hub page for that story. We'll look at those pages in a minute.
Also on offer on the home page is a 'live' option that streams Sky News to your iPad as it happens. We were trying out the app over Wi-Fi and the quality was great.
To the top left of the screen is an option to switch from the top stories view to a timeline view ? which (as the name suggests) allows you to chronologically list the stories rather than look at the more editorialised view.
It does this by placing the latest story to the right and you can scroll back left across the timeline. It sounds obvious and it is ? intuitive, nicely designed and well thought through.
Back on to the hub pages, and we get a taste of just how powerful an experience the Sky News app for iPad provides.
The page groups the relevant content around the story. Obviously the top story today across the globe is the crisis in Japan, and the grouped coverage is comprehensive.
There is a central report and around the outside is a timeline of how the story unfolded, supporting graphics and graphs, galleries of the harrowing images and maps, along with other video reports on some of the other aspects of the story and text reports.
One criticism that is likely to be levelled at the Sky News app is that the text reports do feel a little after the Lord Mayor's show ? this is an app that doesn't seem particularly fond of the written word, but it's been shoved in there for a sense of completeness anyway.
Throughout all of this content there is the option to have video running live, either blown up to full screen or in the corner as you take a peek at the supporting content.
The whole application feels futuristic; it's immediately nice to play around with and, as we said, easy to use. It is clear that this is a video-led app that is wonderfully suited to the fine screen on an iPad.
But there are three huge issues that have to be considered when you look at the Sky News app for iPad
First up, and perhaps not as critical as it seems on the surface, this will become a paid for app at some point this year, but only if you are not a Sky subscriber ? subscribers pay nothing.
Is this a massive barrier? Definitely for those who are just after news and don't pay for satellite TV; but Sky is confident that it has enough subscribers with iPads to mean that the app will be a success.
Secondly,this is an online application. If you check out the news on the underground or on a train through areas with patchy coverage this may not be the app for you. Sky News has decided that it is all about the now (the app is updated every minute) and isn't interested in offering offline content.
Which is a shame, because you think the combination of the two would not only give an obvious boost in terms of commuter worth, but also give that pesky text a much-needed larger role.
And onto the third issue ? which for many people is a potential dealbreaker: The Sky News app for iPad only focuse on the major news stories.
That means if you like tech news on a day when Steve Jobs hasn't taken to the stage, then you might as well not bother. If you are looking for the Chelsea score from last night, then you might not find it and if you are interested in anything from the world of entertainment, weather or the quirky section, give up now ? they aren't going to be there.
It's a crying shame, but it appears that the sacrifice made in order to bring a brilliant experience to the main stories means that there is not enough in the tank to focus on anything else.
Unhelpfully, when TechRadar asked about this narrowing of the news agenda,Sky pointed out that there are other apps available ? which rather missed the point of a news app.
This is a wonderful application, beautifully designed and fun to use ? but by focusing so entirely on a few topics, it may well find that it's missing out on a huge audience who want to look beyond the headlines but not beyond the news.
But, presumably, that's something that can be rectified.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/d4iv-QRIUxA/story01.htm
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