Perth (my home town) has just received it’s first news app for the state developed by The Sunday Times (which is owned by News Ltd. -the Australian arm of News Corporation) to enable West Australians to access news on their iPads as they would normally with a traditional newspaper.

Sadly, it’s just the same old from newspaper publishers trying to carbon copy their traditional print media behaviour in digital app form and it’s noticeable right from the beginning. Starting up the app you’re stuck at the spinning wheel loading screen for a good 2 – 3 minutes. Why? Because the Perthnow app operates in edition format; one at 7am and one at 7pm. This is amazingly bizarre to me that an internet connected and basically always on device is treated to news delivered in the same way a paper boy would deliver the news the front lawn years ago. Who would of thought something as volatile and ever changing as the news has to be delivered in a edition form over the internet to a tablet?

You begin browsing around the application and discover something even more annoying that the ever patient wait for the download to finish; pre load advertisements. I am hoping that these pre load advertisements will disappear when the free trial expires but regardless I’m worried that this old school style of delivering content is just going to ruin the idea of great content (Flipboard, Zite, Our choice) for consumers who bought the iPad as the next generation content consumption device.

Everything about this app feels less like the iPad is always connected and instead feels more like the device waits for the paperboy to deliver it’s latest round of news. Every time you relaunch the app from the background it prompts if you want to replace your content and download the latest batch of news. Sorry? Are we in some sort of data shortage on my 16GB iPad or are you so modelled on your outdated brother that you need to delete any old news because the stack of newspapers is out?


As you browse more it just gets worse and worse, as you swipe back and forth between articles these will invoke the pre load advertisements ruining the flow of the iOS swiped based gestures and your ability to quickly glance at the content and move on to the next page.
Each article just feels like a newspaper article because there is no effort to make the related images interactive or at least alive on the iPad, even in the Confidential section there was 2×3 grid of photos that you couldn’t touch to zoom in. It all just feels like a PDF surrounded by a menu system and god awful advertisement “engine”.

I’d rather see newspaper team up with the people at Flipboard to get their content syndicated through their section catalogue. It just makes sense, Flipboard is a company built to design content to fit the tablet and mobile experience and newspapers are companies built to create content for the consumers; they are not designers and they clearly don’t use an iPad or any tablet on a regular occasion.

Just like most newspapers didn’t get blogs, I don’t think many newspaper houses get iPads. And they shouldn’t, it’s not their job to so why not offload their content to the marketplace of Zite or Flipboard?