Naked Startup

Our Attempt to become the Pull-To-Refresh of iPad News Apps

When we launched version 1.0 of Today's News - we were quite aware that it's navigation UI was flawed and needed quite a bit of work. The first thing I do when I read any newspaper is to scan the cover page and then jump straight to the sports section, and then work my way through the rest of the paper. The first version of Today's News didn't let the user do that easily. But we launched anyway, because apparently real artists ship.

As we were rolling out version 1.0 and waiting for the App Store gods to approve our work, we were hard at work at making changes to the navigation UI. Very early on, Andy had sketched a version of what he thought it should look like, but said - "this is definitely version 1.1, let's get this version out the door quickly". As is evident from the sketch below, it had a heads-up display which would let the user scrub between stories, but it would also graphically denote to the user the length of each section in the paper, which upholds the Today's News ethos of not ever showing counts of stories, but yet subtly managing to tell the user what he needs to know about the day's paper. The coolest thing (and my favorite bit) of the new UI is the ability to tap in a section, which would then bring you to the first story of that section. So for example, if you tapped anywhere in the Sports Section, it would bring you to the first sports story.

I spent a couple of days working on a rough implementation of Andy's sketch and after a few days of our combined polishing, we've gotten to a stage where this UI is something we're really proud of (and as an aside, I personally couldn't stand to look at version 1.0 when a much improved version 1.1 was waiting in the wings). To make things obvious, you can even skip between sections using the conventional method which is to tap left and right arrows. We've also made the HUD on-demand, so you tap once to bring up the navigation HUD and tap again to make it disappear. The pleasant side-effect of this is that you get more room for the content of the article, leading to a much more pleasant reading experience and that's the whole point really. Here's a brief peek at what it looks like.

Please excuse the less-than-professional video quality. This was done with an iPhone4 and a flaky Internet connection in India. You can watch it in full HD glory here.

We believe this is a nifty piece of innovation and we're (not-so-)secretly hoping this will became the "pull-to-refresh" of iPad news apps ;)

Another important piece of feedback that we've received from plenty of people is that the ads spoil the elegance of the app. While we'd love to provide an in-app purchase to remove ads from the app, we're unfortunately limited by the terms and conditions of Guardian's Open Platform. We have to live with the fact that despite the elegance and beauty of our product, we're still sharecroppers on the Guardian's wonderful farm.

Version 1.1 of Today's News is now live on the App Store and is ready for download.