After today’s unveiling of The Daily at a press event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City, we were handed iPads loaded with the news app. I shot the video above with my iPhone to give a quick sense of what it looks like and the navigation.
It looks like a magazine more than a newspaper, with lush photography and the occasional interactive graphic or video in place of a photo. The first thing I noticed is that there are no links in any of the stories, although you can share stories via Facebook, Twitter, or email. But that is about the extent of the social features in the app. As I expected, it is does not (yet) offer any social reading features like Flipboard or the yet-to-launch News.me
To find your way around, there is atable of content, but that only lists the top ten stories. You can flip through chronologically or navigate by section (news, Gossip, Opinion, Arts & Life, Apps & Games, or Sports). When you are in a story, you can tap to expose a timeline with thumbnail images of each page up top. Finally, there is a carousel view that lets you go through the issue like you can with album covers in iTunes. It would be helpful if there were a content page that simply listed all the headlines in that issue with links.
The ads take up their own pages, just like in a magazine. I noticed that the ads take a lot longer to load than the news pages. That could be a problem if it is not fixed in terms of pleasing advertisers.
You can save stories for later reading, but apparently the app is loaded with new stories every day. So unless you read or save the stories you are interested in, for now you are out of luck. On stage, News corp indicated they are working on this issue.
Related:
Rupert Murdoch: “New Times Demand New Journalism”
The Daily Event Liveblog: Follow Along As The Newspaper Hits The Information Age
Murdoch: The Daily Will Cost $0.14 Per Day Or $0.99 Per Week
One-Click Subscriptions Come To the iPad
What Are The Odds We’ll See An Android Version Of The Daily?