Life is too short to muck about with electronic news sources that don’t let me save text, email annotations, and blog excerpts. I can understand restricting the free stuff that’s given away on web sites, but punishing paid subscribers by taking away the flexibility and mash-up-ability of etext?
This is all rather amusing, not unlike watching Time-Warner stumble from the laughable pathfinder.com to the ill-advised AOL merger. It sounds like the guys who make these decisions need a cute six-year-old kid in the boardroom, maybe with name like Little Timmy Freckles or Sally-Ann Buttercup, who will point out all the flaws in the plan.
The Daily, like many other news apps, gives you the option to post a link on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The Daily’s links, however, lead to web page versions that are giant images of the article. In contrast, the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s iPad- generated links lead to html text-rich web articles, which can be saved in a variety of ways as editable and searchable text. All three news apps allow, you, the iPad subscriber, to save a copy of the article to your iPad for later viewing. Note, though, that NONE of these three iPad news apps are yet searchable. Nor are the articles you save from them to your iPad searchable. Neither are the AP, BBC News, or the Washington Post iPad apps. By contrast, the Financial Times, the Huffington Post, Engadget, and Mashable all provide a search feature, however primitive.
Unlike the Wall Street Journal’s iPad edition, which keeps one week’s worth of issues available on the iPad, The Daily has a very short memory. When you, the subscriber to The Daily, tap on its app, the new version immediately overrides any previous version. In so doing, it cuts off your access to the articles from the previous edition (unless you stopped to save copies to your iPad). Unless you saved a copy of a particular article from the previous day to your iPad, posted a link to it on Facebook or Twitter, or emailed a link to yourself, you can kiss access to that article goodbye. This is both annoying and disturbing.
via Why is The Daily Written in Disappearing Ink? « Islandlibrarian’s Blog.
