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 secure, with larger, higher high quality pictures on the house display screen.
We’re busy performing some analysis and pondering in the meanwhile about what persons are on the lookout for in our Information apps in the long term, however we thought that within the meantime, it was necessary to repair one or two bugs affecting some customers of the prevailing app and to make it a greater, slicker expertise general.
We need to ensure that the present app stays an effective 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, useful to learn offline too.
So, it’s going to 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 means of the screens and tales.
The bigger homescreen pictures we have launched serve two functions:
- first, you may see what’s in them extra clearly and there is extra room for the headline
- second, their positioning makes it clearer that you may scroll horizontally in every information class to disclose extra tales (we seen that in person testing some folks assumed there have been solely three tales a piece).
There’s a new format on iPad if 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 all in favour of.
Among the many bugs that we have mounted is a matter that typically induced the app to get caught when updating, and one other the place you typically noticed duplicate tales inside a single information class.
For our product workforce, these enhancements required a reasonably main remodeling of the app’s code. The excellent news is that they’re now working from a extra secure base which may be constructed on with new options and performance. This revising of our code is one thing we have already carried out with our Android app, so we’ll now be capable of 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 obtainable internationally.
For those who’re a person of the app, or resolve to strive it out, we hope you will just like the enhancements we have made. And as we take into consideration our apps usually and plan our subsequent steps, we might like to listen to about what you’d most prefer to see in future.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the BBC Information web site.