Don't buy The Australian iPad app

After buying my iPad over in the US, and spending time familiarising myself with the news apps from the likes of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, BBC and others, I'd become somewhat spoilt by all the different ways these so called "dinosaurs" of publishing could get me to read their news stories.

A week after I came home to Sydney, I heard all the hype about The Australian iPad app. The guys over at News Limited were determined to be the first Australian publisher to be out there with an iPad app, and they would only charge $4.99 per month for the privilege of reading their fine publication.

Well, now I've spent a few weeks with the app, I have to say, there is not a person alive I would recommend it to. Not for five bucks, not even if it were free. Allow me to explain why, using a few brief points, some pictures, and even offer you a (MUCH better) alternative.

Why The Australian iPad app is balls.

Reason 1: It's not "text" but rather a series of images"

So far as I can tell, and nobody has been able to indicate to me otherwise, the Oz's app doesn't actually bother to give you text to read like say, a website, or any other application. Instead, it renders everything as still images (PNG's from what I can deduce). Why, you might ask? BECAUSE YOU THIEVING PIECE OF CRAP, YOU MIGHT STEAL THEIR NEWS!

What other possible reason can there be for making a product, which is essentially based around giving you text to read, in a non-text format? God forbid you should be unhappy with the pre-determined text size due to your age, vision impairment, or just because you're sitting on the toilet and want to read the news from slightly afar. Because you know what, you can't. Not because the iPad doesn't let you (in fact, the iPad has a whole bunch of built in features to allow for text manipulation to make it easy for the elderly and those with poor eye-sight to read), but because The Australian is so incredibly paranoid that somebody might "copy and paste" the whole friggin newspaper, and pass it around to their friends, thereby robbing them of precious, precious revenue.

And if you happen to have a serious vision impairment, or perhaps happen to be blind? Well, in that case, the Australian would like to stick up it's middle finger at you, and tell you it doesn't give a shit about your money, because the built-in (and quite good) voice-over and text-to-speech functionality does not work one iota on The Australian's crippled iPad app. Why? Again, because it's all just a bunch of images.

Reason 2: Its interface designers seem to hate people

I've seen a lot of poor interfaces in my time, and I mean a LOT. But attempting to navigate through The Australian's iPad app makes me yearn for the early days of flashing lights and moving GIF's of Geocities. Why exactly there are drop down lists for sections of the newspaper that don't actually have a list for which to require a drop-down is not only stupid, but incredibly annoying. The "articles" panel on the left hand side of the story-mode is a hit-and-miss affair, and there is now way to simply overview all items within the newspaper, or god forbid, search.

Whether the team was rushed, trying to get the app out before the first iPad hit the shelves in Australia, or whether they were developers who'd never designed an interface before, or even if it was outsourced, does not really matter. There are at least 10,000 totally free apps in the App Store marketplace with better interfaces, that have been created with less resources than News Ltd has at it's disposal. Frankly, I feel like The Australian's iPad development team just didn't even bother thinking about how people would actually use the application, but rather just focused on how they could get ad's in there.

Reason 3: Most obnoxious adverts, EVER

Now, I work in advertising, so usually, I'm not actually all that bothered by ads. In fact, ads are good, they keep me employed, and are an integral part of a modern economy (well, that is debatable, but anyway), so when I tell you that these ads are obnoxious, you should take into account that this is coming from a person who sees ads day in, day out, and depends on them for an income.

The Australian doesn't just "show" you an ad like it would on the website, after all, why should it? This isn't the 'interwebs' where you can just get your news from other sources or anything, no, this is an application that you have PAID good money for. So here, whenever you click on a section, how about I put a gigantic ad covering the whole friggin page for you.

In fact, how about, instead of putting any kind of smarts behind the app, I will just put this ad here, in front of this section, EACH and EVERY time you go to that section, completely regardless of how many times you've seen it already.

There are an infinite number of ways a publisher could have integrated advertising into it's news application. This is a new platform, things are different, hey, why don't we try something new? NO! We must use the exact same model that we did for newspapers. Almost bit for bit.

Overall, after forcing myself to use this application for a fortnight, I finally gave up. I have to say, this is beyond a doubt one of the worst, if not THE worst, example of a news reading application in the app store.

What can you do instead? Well, here's what I did.

The antidote:

Reeder

Reeder is a fantastic little RSS Reader that was designed by one guy (or so I'm lead to believe). It is 1 dollar more than The Australian, but it doesn't have recurring fees, so you just pay it once. (download from iTunes here)

Reeder lets you take RSS feeds from any source, it will even sync with your Google Reader account (if you have one) and provides you not only with bucket-loads of functionality, but an interface that will make you want to keep reading.

In my case, I just went to www.theaustralian.com.au/help/rss which will give you a full listing of the available RSS feeds available. Then, add them into either Reeder directly, or to your Google Reader.

Once you've got your feeds sorted and grouped, you can access that "stack" of feeds from within Reeder. It will sort them by the latest news, it will remove items you've already read, and keep it generally clean and tidy.

Once you're in your stack, you should see all the news items in a nice clean list. You can sort multiple ways, including items you've not read yet, or have starred (made a favourite), or chronologically.

The interface is simple, and it feels as though no space has been wasted. Very clean and efficient, yet still pleasant.

When you turn the iPad sideways, you get your navigation, as well as reading element, side by side. Again, it's very clean, feels intuitive to use, and has all the functions you need to "star" and article if you want to refer to it later, or send it to a friend, etc...

Now, due to the fact that The Australian wants you to go to their website, so that it can show you ads, so it can make money (which is fair enough), the RSS feed is truncated, meaning only the first paragraph of the story comes through. When you click on the heading of the article, Reeder opens the link in a built-in web-browser, so you never have to leave the application.

Ironically, when the page opens in the browser, it suddenly has the text-size changing functions, as well as share functions that are notably absent from The Australian's paid application. And yes, now you can select the text, copy, past to your heart's content.

Reeder also includes a whole stack of functions that make the whole experience just awesome. If you use Delicious for bookmarking, want to tweet about what you're reading, want to send it to Instapaper, Email, or a stack of other services, it's all there within one button click.

The experience is really well thought through, and frankly makes The Australian's iPad app look like a complete joke. Reeder's use of standard RSS technology not only means that you can have news from more than one provider bundled into the one app, but also that it downloads a LOT faster than The Australian, and uses a lot less of your bandwidth.

Spending $4.99 per month on The Australian, at least in the current state of their iPad app, is ridiculous. Anybody who is even remotely thinking about it, should seriously reconsider.

As for the guys at News Ltd, you need to have a look at both The Financial Times app (which is phenomenal), and Reeder. Both of these will show you what a good news delivery application should look and feel like.

Cheers.