iPhone Sites That Suck: PressDisplay
I had high hopes for this site when I first noticed it in the Apple Web Apps directory. It seemed very promising, and maybe it still will be if they put *a lot* of work into their iPhone version – but for now, not good at all.
PressDisplay seems a good concept to me (and it may well be OK on a PC already) – it lets you choose your favorite newspapers and other news titles from a good, broad list of some 500 titles from 70 countries, and then browse through stories from all, or select just one to view at the moment and so on. Nice idea it seems to me – I quickly ran through their list and chose The Guardian, The London Evening Standard, The Miami Herald, Washington Post, a Spanish newspaper, and others – and thought great, let’s browse through these.
Small problem though – very small problem in fact. See the screencaps above? Notice how it looks like anything below headline text is tiny and impossible to read? Well, that’s because it is. That’s OK though right – it’s an iPhone optimized site – I’ll just double-tap to zoom … and nothing happens. OK, I’ll use two fingers to zoom in … nope, no dice. What you see (very little) is what you get.
So I can look at the cover page of The Guardian, like I could from yards away while walking past a newsagent, but I can’t read any of it. Marvelous. Same for The Washington Post, The Evening Standard, The Dallas Morning News, and a few other titles I tried.
Then I thought perhaps the front pages were just intended to be treated differently, as decoration almost, and if I drilled down to some content inside the papers, I’d see real, readable content. So I gave that a go:
And … yeah, I can’t really read below the headline there either – and that is as zoomed in as I can get it.
Now I have to tell you, PressDisplay does have a main home page where there is a listing of Top Stories – and those are formatted quite nicely for the iPhone, on both the listing with short summaries view, and the individual story view. But … that page seems to pull its contents from wherever it likes, not based at all on my selection of favorite titles. I did not see an obvious preferences setting to swap this to display my preferred titles – so this is just a pretty weak news headline listing, that really doesn’t match up to Yahoo or Google News or any general sort of news aggregator.
What interested me about PressDisplay was choosing my own lost of quite a few good news sources and seeing them all displayed nicely and fast-loading on the iPhone. I don’t find the site interesting as a Yahoo or Google News alternative. So the one area that did interest me, and the one they are really touting in their Apple Web Apps entry – "Allows you to get access to hundreds of newspapers from around the world." – is the one that sucks, from my experience with it.
There is also some sort of tiering of how many digital ‘issues’ of titles I can look at / get before I have to change from a free account to various levels of paid account. I didn’t explore those at all – as I think this could be a nice service, but still not one I’d pay for even if it was working perfectly I don’t think, as I could just as easily RSS-subscribe to the titles I’m interested in.
PressDisplay could be quite a nice little aggregator of good news titles for the iPhone, if they put in some work on making the iPhone version work a whole lot better. For now though, I have to say I find newspapers more interesting when I can read the content in them …
If you want to give PressDisplay a try yourself, and tell me what I’m missing, give it a look at:
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With the iPhone’s massive impact on mobile web browsing, iPhone specific sites are popping up in great numbers every day – some very good, some that suck. If you’ve spotted any that really stand out in either category, let us know by email to news AT justanotheriPhoneblog.com – you know the deal, replace AT with an @ symbol and get rid of the spaces. Look forward to seeing your favorite – or least favorite – sites …
Got to disagree with this, I find PressDisplay Mobile one of my most used sites, and think the iPhone interface works very well. Yes, you see a photo of each page of the newspaper as you describe, but then underneath it there is a headline and summary of each story on the page, along with a link to read the full text of the article.
What the service does is pull together all the articles in each edition of the particular newspaper, organized on a page by page basis. Depends on the paper, but this is generally very different than Yahoo or Google News, which aggregates web or newsfeed based stories. For example, there are many articles in the daily Guardian newspaper that do not make it onto the Guardian Unlimited website.
Maybe this is a specialized app (I’m a UK expat in the USA who likes to “read” the Guardian on my iPhone while on the bus on the way to work) but what it gives me is the full content of paper organized within the actual structure of the paper (an experience close to reading the actual newspaper itself). I find it intuitive and easy to read (but then I still get most of my news from newspapers and not online). If you’re only interested in the information itself, and not the way the information is organized into an actual newspaper, then I agree the news aggregators are a better way to go.
So you’re more than free to say it’s an iPhone application that sucks, but your piece seems to imply that the only way you can read the stories is to peer very closely at the photographs of the page, which is clearly not true.
mancred – thanks for the comment. Checked it out again, and yes the story summaries down at the bottom of pages are better to work with. But … I still found this to be a very clumsy way to try to read a story. The way they seem to have implemented it is that when I look at a story summary on a storm hitting the Northeast on the front page (for example), I see just the first sentence below the headline. To get more of the story I need to look at what page it tells me the rest of the story is on, go to the rollerbar for page selection and choose ’3A’ for example, then go to that page and not directly to the story I was at, but to another full listing of stories, and then click again on my story’s headline.
I would argue that this method is not wonderful even when you’re holding a physical newspaper – read one paragraph, flip to page 10 (or wherever) to continue reading. But, on an iPhone it’s a terrible method to have adopted – I don’t want to repeatedly scan a list of one-sentence summaries, then require several selections and taps just to get to the full story on each one. Seems very clumsy to me.
I can see your point about the attraction being the ability to read the *full* Guardian newspaper (a good example for me too, as that was one of my first selections) and that’s why I still think this site has potential – I just don’t think its layout and navigation are any good at all. Even showing the large front page picture, for example, serves almost zero purpose that is helpful to me in getting information, and it takes up a huge amount of space on the page – that’s very poor design, in my view.
Hi Patrick, Mancred and all,
Thank you for all the comments – we encourage you to keep sharing your thoughts on PressDisplay for iPhone users (as well as those who access the service on other types of devices, both mobile and stationary). We want to make sure the experience on iPhone is great and do encourage you to continue sending us your feedback. You can do it directly by emailing to pressdisplay@newspaperdirect.com.
It appears that an incorrect URL was listed for a short while on the Apple Web Apps page (listed as http://mobile.pressdisplay.com). And quite a lot of experiences described above were based on using a site from that URL. In fact, the correct URL for all types of devices is simply http://www.pressdisplay.com: the system will automatically determine whether you are accessing the service from an iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile device, or simply from a PC or Mac, and optimise the user experience for that particular device.
We would also welcome all users of PressDisplay to visit our blog (http://blog.pressdisplay.com) on a regular basis. There is a special iPhone category there, which you can visit by clicking here: http://blog.pressdisplay.com/category/iphone/. We’ve also recorded a couple of videos, showing the functionality of PressDisplay on various devices, including iPhones. You will notice that iPhone is a perfect device for digital newspaper and magazine reading. Not only can you browse top stories from over 600 worldwide publications, but you can also see the table of contents for each individual publication’s issue, being able to select the articles of interest. Thanks to the great image display engine in iPhone, you can also zoom in and out on the image of each individual newspaper and magazine page (using, of course, the finger pinching, native to iPhones).
We work hard on many levels to bring together world’s publishers in one place while providing, as was mentioned here earlier, full content publications in an original format (and this what makes this service different from individual newspapers’ and magazines’ websites). New publications and enhanced features are being introduced on a regular basis. We hope you will (or will continue to) enjoy PressDisplay and share your thoughts with us, so we can make each user’s experience the most enjoyable one.
Thank you once again,
Igor Smirnoff
Director, Strategic Development
NewspaperDirect, Inc.
Hi Igor
Thanks a lot for taking time to comment, and to point us at the correct URL for PressDisplay on the iPhone / mobile devices. That’s awful that the Apple Web Apps directory had it listed wrong. It makes a *big* difference seeing the correct site. I’ve been browsing round the site quite a bit this evening, and liking it much better. Clicking a story link now takes me directly to the story itself, rather than just to a page with many stories’ summary listings as before.
I did still find that the images of each newspaper’s cover were not zoomable for me- maybe I’m missing something there, but if they’re really not zoomable, I think they’re a waste of space.
Thanks again for the comments. I like PressDisplay’s concept, was just very disappointed with the delivery of it – not so much now, and have bookmarked it, and will be updating this post as well …
Hi guys!
Apologies for delay in responding (was away on business).
Patrick, thank you for pointing to the fac that the images were not zoomable – the feature was always availbale there from Day One, but we must have deactivated it by accident while perfomring one of the upfdates. The zooming has been fixed and, as suggested, having it avaiable on iPhone makes a huge difference
Thanks again!
Cheers from Vancouver,
Igor