Since the release of our new iPhone and iPad app about a month ago, we've received a lot of valuable feedback from readers about issues they're having, or features they'd like to see improved or tweaked.
I'm pleased to say that we've just released our first major update to the app, which includes more than 300 changes — from small bug fixes to major improvements to content and navigation.
Download it now and let us know what you think. We are committed to continuing to improve our app with regular updates over the coming weeks and months.
Here are some of the most important changes you'll see in the app, as of today:
Stories and content
- Our Top Headlines section, now available on both iPad and iPhone, offers access to the most recent Globe stories from across our top areas of coverage, including national news, business news, politics, investing, world news, sports, life, arts and Globe Drive
- We’ve updated the home screen view on the iPhone to make it easier for readers to scan the latest headlines. The new home screen includes the most important stories for a particular edition, followed by an easy-to-scan list of the top headlines
- We've also introduced new sections for Sports and Life & Arts to make it easier to find the sports news, columns and latest scores, as well as create a dedicated space for our coverage of arts, culture, food, wine, fashion, health, travel and automotive
- Each section now includes a list of personalized headlines recommended for you based on your reading habits. This will be gradually rolled out over the next week or so
Navigation
We've introduced a new way to navigate from articles to section pages. After tapping on an article, swipe right on the article page to move back to the section page, or swipe left to read the next article. When you go back to the section page, the app will remember where you were, so you can continue browsing from where you left off.
Breaking news alerts
Tapping on a breaking news alert will now take you directly to the story.
Other updates
- We’ve made improvements to the way ads are displayed throughout the app
- You are now able to login and register using Facebook or Twitter
- You can now easily reveal related content to a story by swiping up from the bottom of the article page
- Articles can now be bookmarked and un-bookmarked
Bug fixes
- The app now refreshes content properly when coming back to it after backgrounding
- External links in a story page will now open correctly 100 per cent of the time
- Embedded videos in the story page will now play consistently
- Fixed a crash that happened when reading large articles
- Fixed a crash that happened when viewing bookmarked content
- Fixed a bug where photo galleries sometimes showed small images
- You can now consistently launch a video or gallery directly from a section page
- Improved performance and design of articles with embedded graphics and multimedia
- Fixed an issue where some users were not being logged out properly
- Lots of updates to the app to increase performance and stability
Finally, just want to say thank you again for all the feedback over the last month. We've read every e-mail, review and comment and have adjusted our update schedule to reflect it. As mentioned, we will continue to release major updates to the app in the upcoming weeks and months.
As always, feel free to get in touch with any thoughts about the new update.
Matt Frehner