With one day to go, the official NBC Olympics app is a bit of a mess
The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics begin tomorrow, and if you haven't already seen the coverage from journalists who have arrived in Russia for the festivities, well, let's say there's a lot of work that clearly won't be done in time for tomorrow's opening ceremony. And it seems that same "unfinished" theme carries over to the official Olympics highlights and results app from NBC as well.
The app is designed to be a one-stop shop for news from the games, and while I can't judge it on its promptness -- since there have been no results yet, of course -- the app has a number of issues.
For starters, some of the images for the columns and video content are incorrectly cropped, leading to some squashed faces and otherwise ugly graphics. That's not really a deal-breaker, so we'll overlook it.
Then there's the matter of the content itself not showing up after following a link from the front page of the app. Some stories seem to load fine, while others are simply nowhere to be found. You can click a teaser on the "What's Hot" list and get a blank page. That's a problem.
On top of those two issues, there are all kinds of errors that pop up randomly on the top and bottom of the screen. I don't know what an "SSI file" is, but the app seems to have problems processing it.
Oh, and there's a yellow bar at the bottom of the screen that reads "Base mobile - from 320px (20em) to 480px (30em)" which seems like some sort of formatting guide for the developers that was never taken out or cleaned up.
All in all, it's kind of an embarrassing effort on NBC's part and definitely not worth downloading despite the fact that it's free. Unless they release the actual finished version, it'll remain a major disappointment.
