News Cues is personalized news aggregator with potential
News Cues is a news aggregator that brings national headlines at any given moment direct to the app in an easy-to-read format. In doing so, it also links to other sources reporting on the same news story so you get to see every angle plus choose your favorite publication to read from. Even more than that, the CueBrain feature lets you tweak the categories of news to your liking or learn about your interests based on what you read. News Cues is free for iPhone and iPad and requires iOS 7.0 or later.
The app organizes stories by prominence, so every time you open News Cues the first story you see should be a combination of what's most popular at that moment along with what's relevant to you. It accomplishes this with CueBrain, a technology that's enabled by default. Based on what you tap and read, News Cues learns your tastes and eventually starts showing more of what's relevant to your interests and less of what isn't.
If you don't want CueBrain learning too much about you, it's easy enough to disable. Just tap the Menu icon on the top left and choose "Off" under the CueBrain section. When off, sliders appear to manually adjust how much you want to see of various news categories: general news, sports, technology, business and entertainment.
When you tap an article in News Cues, it opens up basically an in-app browser and displays the story at its original source. This is the disappointing portion of the app. What it comes down to is that News Cues is acting like a medium between you and the news websites, and mediums are often unnecessary. I wouldn't go as far as to say that in this case, however I do wish News Cues had a built-in reader instead of just loading a website every time I tap an article.
Underneath every major story in the list complete with a header photo is a collapsed list of additional sources. Tapping this reveals the other headlines and the publications that wrote them. It's handy if you're nitpicky about what you read on the Internet. The app does a pretty good job with matching the various sources all to the same news report. There's never more than 10 sources and often there might only be one or two.
That's really the extent of News Cues. It's a very bare bones app for now and hence has room for improvement and a wider array of features. I see the built-in reader as a must. It's frankly amateur for article headlines to act as links to mobile Safari. While I'm slipping ideas in the suggestion box, it'd be nice down the road to be able to browse the news by category rather than all aggregated together. This is somewhat possible with the current topic sliders, but that's not quite ideal.
News Cues is a good app, but needs a few more updates until it's a great one. It's free for iOS in the App Store.