The Daily Beast website now offers a clever iOS app (Updated)
The Daily Beast website has been around since 2008. It's now owned by Newsweek/International Business TimesIAC, focusing on politics and the arts.
With a new free iOS app, readers get an easy-to-use look at the Daily Beast with a quick swipe feature that lets you skip what you don't like and read what you do like. The app also keeps stats about what type of news you are reading and makes suggestions. It doesn't provide full personalization like Zite, but the Daily Beast app does make sure you will get a relevant-to-you mix of news and features.
When you launch the app up for the first time, you get a slowly rendered total of how many stories people have read and skipped for the day. When I want to read some news, that type of metadata is pretty much at the bottom of my list of priorities, so I'd like to see that feature dumped.
Beyond the slow start, the app is actually pretty good, with highly readable photos and text. Once you've read an article, it is dimmed so you don't accidentally re-open it. Scrolling is smooth. Clicking on links takes you out of the app -- it would be far better to built in a browser so users are not shuttling back and forth between multiple apps.
Scrolling down to the end of an article brings up the next one, and that's far better than having to go back to a main page. Whether you get the next article depends on the "force" of your scrolling, which might confuse some users. If you swipe to the left you get a "skip" message, and the next article appears.
Daily Beast fans will certainly want this app, although news from The Daily Beast can also be added to a dedicated page in Zite, where I also read it. At the top right of The Daily Beast app is a summary of how many stories you have read and skipped, and what news category they are in, like politics or fashion entertainment for example. This is a clever app, but it needs some fine tuning to make it faster to launch.
The Daily beast requires iOS 7.0 and is optimized for the iPhone 5.
