A review of the iPad app for The Financial Times
How useful will the iPad be in revolutionising the traditional publishing industry? We asked Bristol, London, and now New York based app development company, Mubaloo to review the first media apps to be launched on the iPad.
A review of the Financial Times iPad app:
The app is free to access until 31st July, but after that it will require a subscription.
The newspaper type layout is easy to navigate to main stories. Although sometimes the navigation is a bit confusing with a mix of flicking pages, scrolling, left and right arrow buttons and a big back button on the left. I feel the app could be made to feel more intuitive.
What I like about the iPad app:
• The gallery of videos at the bottom of the page.
• The content is easy to read, however it would be better if you could zoom in on the text.
• Adverts look quite good and aren't too intrusive.
• Stocks page looks really nice, all the information is laid out really clearly with interactive graphs (I'd imagine this could be pretty useful).
• The menu at the top of the page that allows you to quickly navigate to main sections.
What I dislike about the iPad app:
• The page has to load most of the content as you read so isn't good for reading offline.
• I tried using it without a connection and it just froze on a blank screen (pretty basic problem but needs fixing).
The Financial Times iPad app has 3 stars on the app store, some reviews say that the content isn't updated regularly enough and isn't the same content as the physical newspaper. Therefore it can't replace the newspaper until it has the same or more content.”
James Priestley, developer at Mubaloo
Check out yesterday's review of the iPad app for The Times, also by James Preistley.