Bizarrely, this app seems to be written with a "put the desktop version on a smaller screen" approach. This is sort of an inexcusable failure when considering modern mobile development. Here's my experience:
- First thread I tried to read crashed the app. Twice. Evidently this particular thread is damaging to iPhone apps.
- Second thread I tried to read did actually load, but on post 1. FT knows what the last post in a thread I've read is. Please just take me to the new content.
- Two ads on the screen at a time is overkill. Especially for paying users. It's amazing how those ads always show up, even when the content has difficulty loading.
- No horizontal orientation mode for when I would prefer to read content without it wrapping every 4 words. No excuse for leaving this out.
- Space, space, space. Look at the sheer percentage of space that is devoted to "chrome" - ie, controls and information that are NOT content. The title bar with Back/Home/+. The page numbers "bar" could be eliminated entirely. The title of the thread bar. The TWO ads. The subscribe/search bar at the bottom. In the midst of all this, there is the actual content. You know, the stuff the users type that actually makes IB money when other users read it. The actual valuable content is only allotted 50% of the horizontal space on-screen(!). To add further insult to injury, 15-20% of this space is then dedicated to a left-hand margin that only contains a mostly-useless user tile. The phone is not a desktop; those wasted bars and margins are sacrificing extremely valuable real estate for almost zero value.
After my quick perusal, it seems that this app is a slick way to deliver ads, but about 3 steps backward in functionality from the mobile website. I'll stick to the website for now.
Last edited by baliktad; Dec 20, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Reason: punctuation