I saw a few tweets about the Straits Times app being available for the iPad and thought I check it out. Some initial thoughts and suggestions:

Straits Times app on the iPad

  • EULA should go into the EULA accessible in the App store instead. There’s a least 1 mistake in the EULA, referring to the “I Do not Accept Button” as the “Cancel” button.
  • UI is jerky, it doesn’t respond immediately to finger dragging the screen.
  • Sometimes when you swipe to a new page, the images flashes.
  • Get rid of the animation for unrolling the paper after tapping on the “iPad Edition”, “PDF Edition” or “Breakign News” buttons. It’s unintuitive, especially as there’s a pause before the animation to reveal the article starts.
  • The “Breaking News” UI seems quite different from the “iPad Edition”, e.g. you can scroll articles up and down in “Breaking News” and website-like tabs are used for sections, but you swipe left-right in “iPad Edition” and tab buttons at the bottom are used for sections.
  • There isn’t a clear visual response when you tap on the screen (especially articles) to indicate what you have tapped on. The articles suddenly pop up fullscreen.
  • Crashes within 1 minute of initial use, crashes again within the next few minutes.
  • I like that tapping on the photo thumbnails bring up a fullsize image with the caption. I wonder if there is something interesting that can be done along the lines of The Big Picture.

Straits Times app on the iPhone

  • EULA (see comment for EULA for app running on iPad).
  • Has an irritating ad that animates after each refresh. Perhaps move it to the top or bottom, but either way, just keep it stationary and don’t flash it?
  • App slows down while reloading.
  • In a few minutes testing, seems more stable than running on the iPad.