A few weeks ago, Mikhail asked me to check out the new Reuters app for iOS that debuted on the App Store in February. I usually don’t explicitly read international or financial news, so you’ll never find a news app installed on my iOS device. The iPad makes for a great reading device, but the media companies in India all have terrible iOS apps and don’t really make good use of Newsstand. The only news app that I’ve enjoyed reading in has been the New York Times app. So when I did check out the new Reuters app, it blew me away. Since then, it has stayed installed on my devices and I love to occasionally read through what’s happening around the world.
The Reuters app for iOS is a universal app that is a brilliantly crafted combination of great typography, neat layout, lovely animations & swipe gestures. When you launch the app, the Thomson Reuters logo animates while the content loads for you. The animation of the logo is really well done and quite impressed me. Once loaded, you are presented a simple list of neatly laid out news stories to peruse through. You have titles on the left, masthead image on the right along with the relative timestamp and category. Tapping on any of the cells takes you to the story view, where the content is presented almost exactly like in a good “read later” app. Crisp text, sufficient padding and no ads or pagebreaks — it’s beautiful. You can read through the entire story without any distractions. The navigation bar and the content area and clearly separated so you never lose focus. If you want to share the story, the share button is located at the top right and not in the middle of the content unlike other apps. You can easily pull the top or bottom edges to move to the next story, so you don’t have to leave the screen. I have to commend Reuters for implementing such a beautiful layout.
[showcase slug=”reuters-iphone”]
Back in the main screen, if there’s a new story published while you were reading another one, an orange counter at the top right calls your attention. You can tap the button to take you right to the new content that has just come in. On the iPhone, you can swipe on a story from right to left to browse other stories from the same company or topic. There’s infinite scrolling on the main screen, so you can scroll to the bottom and tap once to load additional stories. There’s a Facebook like menu on the left that reveals the categories like World, Politics, Business, Tech, Market News, Breakingviews, Opinion & Special Reports. You can tap on any of the category and browse the filtered news in the same way as you would on the ‘Home’ view. There’s a search button at the top, so it’s easy to search only for stories that interest you. You can save stories for reading later right within the app and the app also allows you to enable offline-reading. The app has a “Watchlist” section that lets you monitor how your favorite companies are doing with their stocks. But my favorite part of the app is the fact that when you share a news story shared from the app, it generates a custom, clutter-free URL so your friends and followers can read the story much in the same way as you did. Here’s an example.
[showcase id=”7628″]
Reuters is currently working on changing the design of their website as well, so they have a preview in place for the new design. This new design for the website carries the same design principles as the app. No clutter, good typography, a very neat layout — essentially an optimum reading experience for the reader. They have also made it easier to explore new stories as well. They have explained what new changes are coming to Reuters.com here.
The Reuters iOS app is filled with lots of goodness that improves your reading experience. Tiny animations & transitions are crafted perfectly and of course, you have their solid news reporting at the core. I wish more media companies take cues from this. You should definitely check out the app, it’s Free on the App Store.