Yesterday I suddenly discovered a new “eyed” icon in my iPad Mini toolbar. Yes, it’s the update of my favorite news reader and the best personalized digital newspaper. I’m extremely subjective in this assessment, since Zite is one of those apps I start my day with, where I find new and interesting stuff, and about 70% of all topics for Radio-T come to you precisely from Zite.
I’ve been waiting for an update for a long time, but not for the iPad (I was mostly fine with everything there), but for the iPhone. I even wrote them “how long are we going to suffer with the cropped screen on iPhone 5?”. I got this response: “be patient, something big is coming soon”. And here it is, this big thing has arrived.
what we got that’s good:
- huge variety of categories you can subscribe to. Now most news items have categories automatically assigned, clearly shown, and you can subscribe to them.
- noticeably faster rendering of articles in their main “clean” reader mode (especially on my iPad mini). On iPad 3 you won’t notice the difference with the naked eye, but on the mini it noticeably lagged on some pages during initial display. Now everything flies.
- reader page looks very pleasant. Nice background, nice color. It wasn’t as pretty before.
- on iPhone 5 now full screen.
- on iPhone switching categories is much more convenient than before - proper dropdown sheet instead of weird carousel.
less good and even bad things:
- got a persistent feeling that this is not a native app, but something either cross-platform or carefully ported from Android. Some strange buttons in the toolbar (bottom one), closing only by pressing X in the corner, gestures almost don’t work (they used to work). The simplest things like pinch to close/open now don’t work :( Can’t swipe through articles, you have to press a button.
- for such a large number of groups as there are now, their one-level Quicklist doesn’t fit well. Can’t create any catalogs there. Manual sorting capability seems to exist, but it works half the time and often forgets what I did earlier.
- Google Reader connection failed. It just forgot all my credentials (it forgot them after the update for twitter too), and after entering username/password again, Zite shows only a white screen.
- annoying and non-disableable “ad blocks” appeared. It’s not exactly advertising, but content they promote, like “popular on Zite” and “Headline News”. This somewhat undermines the idea of a “personal newspaper”, although what’s in popular is sometimes even interesting. But “Headline”, taking up half of the second screen - this is absolutely irrelevant information for me, just noise and garbage. It’s irritating, yes.
- in the iPhone version the full-screen news view mode disappeared. It wasn’t great before either, but sometimes it was convenient.
summing up - overall a successful update for iPhone and less successful for iPad. Although no tragedy happened here, fortunately. So far CNN (the new owner of the app) hasn’t managed to kill Zite, but some movements in that direction are already noticeable.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.