Recent posts in my Product review Category
July 21, 2011
The Times iPhone app review - a thumbs up from me
I suspect that most blog posts about News International this week will be on another topic, but I’ve been reviewing The Times iPhone app. Here are a few of the things I’ve noticed and liked or disliked.
May 24, 2011
Is the New York Public Library’s “Biblion” app actually the paleofuture of iPad magazines?
Alexis Madrigal asked in The Atlantic if it was “the magazine app of the future”, and I’ve been playing around with Biblion, the app produced by the New York Public Library. Although it has generated some rave reviews, I thought there were some flaws and missed opportunities in the app.
April 13, 2011
Impressions of "The Atavist"
Looking to keep myself entertained on the flight over to Denver for the IA Summit, I thought I’d try out The Atavist.
March 22, 2011
"Neither TV station nor repurposed website" - Sky News app for the iPad
My first impressions of the Sky News app on iPad have been very positive. They’ve promised that it gives “new ways to deliver news to our users”, and it is a very different visual approach.
July 21, 2010
Flipboard: Great app, but is it yet another way for publishers not to get paid?
Personalised social magazine Flipboard for the iPad is a compelling proposition for the consumer - assembling a collection of content based on what has been discussed and shared in your social network. However, due to the way it re-packages content, is it just yet another opportunity for content producers not to get paid for their work?
May 31, 2010
Future of Web Design conference iPhone app review
I recently spent a couple of days at Future of Web Design in London. Beforehand I downloaded the iPhone app, which put the conference programme straight into my pocket, and allowed me to share which sessions I was planning to attend. It was, though, missing one key feature.
April 30, 2010
The mobile digital general election - official party iPhone app review
As part of their election campaign, the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties have all launched official iPhone applications. I've reviewed and compared them.
April 23, 2010
News apps on the iPad - my first impressions
I had my first real grapple with an iPad this week, checking out applications from the New York Times, BBC and USA Today. Whilst I found some things about the device impressive, I also had some concerns about the rush to 'replicate the print experience'.
September 2, 2009
'thelondonpaper' website review
I don't know, you take a couple of days off work to move house become homeless, and people start closing newspapers behind your back. My commute home will shortly face one less obstruction when I'm walking down York Way. It was only at the end of May that doomed free newspaper thelondonpaper was advertising their free website for London - thelondonpaper.com - with a big wrap-around spread that reproduced the newly re-designed site in print. Free seems to have very...
September 12, 2008
A painless way to file your tax return
Very often when I'm writing about some online application or web site or the other, I'm making a list of things that could be improved. It is always much nicer to be able to write something completely in praise of a system - in this case the HMRC's online tax self-assessment application. Well, I can't completely praise the system, since it is designed to part me with my hard-earned money. And you know they are only going to waste it...
September 10, 2008
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - England
England started their attempt to qualify for the 2010 South Africa World Cup at the weekend, with an away game against Andorra. Tonight, they face what is expected to be by far their toughest test in the Group 6, an away match in Zagreb, Croatia. Although I can't say I fancy the Ukraine, Belarus or Kazakhstan away matches much either. During the course of the qualifiers, I'm going to be reviewing the websites of the FAs opposing England. However,...
September 6, 2008
FIFA 2010 World Cup qualifying website review - Andorra
England begin their attempt to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa today, with an away game against Andorra, held at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona. Cue the "there are no easy matches in international football" cliche. England will be trying to qualify from Group 6 which, alongside Andorra, features Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. It has all the hallmarks of a group which England will struggle in, and which they will be berated for by a...
September 4, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 4
I've been reviewing the recent re-design of Mirror.co.uk. I've been impressed with some things, like the organised site map in the footer of the page, a forgiving tag 404 page, and the RSS feeds of tags. I've been less impressed with the gambling strip design, colour-coding and lax taxonomy. Yesterday I looked at some aspects of The Mirror's site search. Mixed horoscope feeds The Mirror has made nearly all of their online content available via RSS, including the full content...
September 3, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 3
Over the last couple of days I've been reviewing The Mirror's recent re-design. I've looked at some of the good and bad in the navigation, and examined their use of tags. Today I'm looking at some of the aspects of the site search design. Lack of detail I noted a distinct lack of detail in the way that The Mirror presents search results. In Amsterdam in September I'll be giving a Euro IA presentation about the ways that you can...
September 2, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 2
Yesterday I started a review of the recently designed Mirror.co.uk site. I was impressed with the way they had organised links to content in a site map at the footer of the page, but less than enamoured of some over-enthusiastic colour-coding, and a 'gambling strip' across the top of every page. Today I wanted to look at the site's use of tags. Story tags The Mirror applies a selection of tags to each story to provide lateral and related navigation....
September 1, 2008
The Mirror re-design review: Part 1
Earlier this year The Daily Mirror re-vamped their website, giving it much more of a visual-led magazine feel. At the time I didn't get the chance to do a review, but as I recently reviewed the re-design of The Telegraph, I thought I would have a look at how the new Mirror design has settled in. Old Mirror design New Mirror design Global navigation and mouse-over As seems to be the fashion at the moment, The Mirror has gone for...
April 4, 2008
Reviewing the Instablogs 'citizen journalism' platform
A couple of week ago I was contacted by the team at Instablogs, asking whether I would be interested in having a look at their site. I normally shy away from this kind of promotion, but I was rather intrigued by the premise of the service, so I did have a look, and had a bit of email to-and-fro with the PR manager. In one sense, Instablogs is just another simple blogging platform. However, it combines the regular concept of...
November 16, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 9 - Daily Star
Although I originally only intended to review 8 newspapers in this series of posts looking at the accessibility of Britain's online newspapers, The Daily Star has recently re-designed. I therefore thought that it would be worth running my eye over the new design for accessibility features, in the same way that I have tested the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times. Text resize Sadly it seems that the new Daily Star...
November 15, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 8 - The Times
I've been looking at how accessible British newspaper websites are, testing the most popular online papers against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, The Sun and The Telegraph. Today, I'm looking at the accessibility of The Times website. Text resize The Times, along with The Mirror and The Guardian was one of only 3 out of the 8 newspapers I tested who allowed users to resize their text...
November 14, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 7 - The Telegraph
Over the last week and a half I've been looking at the accessibility issues surrounding British newspaper websites, and testing some of the most popular against a set of criteria. So far I've looked at the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, and The Sun. So in broadly alphabetical order, provided you count the 'Daily' bit but don't count 'The'. Sometimes. Anyway, today it is the turn of The (Daily) Telegraph. Text resize Allowing your users to control...
November 13, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 6 - The Sun
I'm writing a series of posts about how British newspaper websites perform in a series of accessibility tests. These include simple things, like whether the text on a site is re-sizeable within major browsers, and more complex issues like how the site is rendered by screen reading technology. So far I've examined The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian and The Independent's sites. This post looks at the accessibility of The Sun's site. Unfortunately for me, after I'd done...
November 12, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 5 - The Independent
Last week I started a series of posts testing British newspaper websites against various accessibility standards and issues. So far I've looked at The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Guardian. Today it is the turn of The Independent. Text resize The Independent appears to be almost almost alone amongst the major newspapers in the UK in having a stylesheet 'widget' on the page to allow users to adjust the size of the text that they are viewing...
November 9, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 4 - The Guardian
I've been doing a series of checks on British newspaper websites to see how they match up to their accessibility responsibilities. So far I've looked at the Express, Mail, and Mirror. Today, in the last of this week's reviews, it is the turn of ex-broadsheet The Guardian. For each set of tests I have been looking at the homepage of a site, and then the top story from that day's paper, in order to access both types of template. For...
November 8, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 3 - Daily Mirror
This week I'm looking at the level of accessibility built into British newspaper websites. I started with the Daily Express and Daily Mail, and today I want to look at The Mirror. I'm assessing the paper's homepage and top story page against a number of accessibility criteria. Text resize One of the simplest tests for accessibility is to see whether a site uses relative font sizes or fixed font sizes. Relative font sizes means that users can control for themselves...
November 7, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 2 - Daily Mail
Yesterday I started a series of posts looking at the accessibility of British newspaper websites with an overview of the accessibility performance of the Daily Express website. Today I'm continuing the series by looking at the Daily Mail. I'm testing each newspaper homepage, and a subsequent story page, against a range of accessibility criteria. Text resize The Daily Mail is one of the newspaper sites that uses fixed font sizes in its homepage and story page display. This means that...
November 6, 2007
How accessible are Britain's online newspapers? Part 1 - Daily Express
The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act put the force of law behind the principle that businesses should not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their goods and services. Although yet to be tested by major case law in the UK, it is generally accepted that 'services' includes a business web site, and that therefore businesses should take care to make sure that their sites are as accessible as possible. In theory, this is trivial to accomplish. All that...
October 11, 2007
Gatwick Yotel not quite so swell
Anyone who has been following my trips on Dopplr will know that I've been stomping my carbon encrusted feet all over Europe in the last couple of months, with six flights in just over as many weeks. I've been dragging my better half around with me, but last week she headed back to Crete slightly before I did. She had an early check-in at 5:15am at Gatwick. We decided, instead of travelling through the dead of night, that we'd go...
August 6, 2007
5 quick usability wins for the BBC iPlayer beta trial installation process
Having spent two of the last three weeks sitting very near to the iPlayer development team in the BBC's Future Media and Technology department in White City, I'm aware that there is no shortage of people telling them what they ought to have done with the product. And that is both outside and inside the BBC. From the Open Source Consortium's 'rip it up and use video codec DIRAC instead' vote, to Guardian journalists patiently explaining to commentators on their...
March 2, 2007
Playing with the Virgin Radio player beta
I was nudged the other day into looking at Virgin Radio's beta test of a new streaming internet radio player. The limited testing is only open to those who have registered as VIPs on the Virgin Radio site, which was a nice way of getting a small group of enthusiastic users of the site to try out the new service. My first impressions of the player were very good. Apart from having the streaming area and radio controls, the...
September 5, 2006
"Schmap: Zaragoza Photo Inclusion"
I've been playing around with a downloadable travel guide application called Schmap over the last few days. Essentially it brings together a detailed city map, suggested walks, pictures of a city and reviews of the local night life and eateries, into one download which can be accessed offline. A lot of the content is sourced either from Wcities and Flickr. Using people's Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr gives the Schmap team access to free content, and also provides them...
September 4, 2006
Catalog [sic] your books at Library Thing
My attention was recently drawn to Library Thing, an online application aimed at allowing people to store records of their book collection on the internet, and then providing the usual kind of web 2.0 social goodness around that data. Adding books was blissfully simple, thanks to the foresighted invention of the ISBN. One set of digits gives Library Thing enough information to trawl Amazon and other sources to pull back the correct book. The application even coped well with my...
August 28, 2006
Search across photo-sharing sites from Kodak, Shutterfly, Snapfish and PictureTrail
I've been surveying search across some of the most popular photosharing sites on the web, chiefly to find out whether the tagged 'folksonomy' of Flickr that everybody raves about is really very helpful in trying to find different types of pictures using search. What I didn't realise when I set out on this little study, was how few of the top photo sharing sites actually allow any kind of public sharing. A site like the Kodak EasyShare Gallery seems more...
August 8, 2006
Searching for pictures on ImageShack and Yahoo! Photos
I've been looking at the search services offered by the top photo and image sharing services on the internet. So far I've looked at Photobucket and Slide, and today I want to look at two services that very much focus on the hosting of images rather than providing a sharing service....
August 7, 2006
Using image search on Slide
I've been looking at the search services across a number of the most popular photo-sharing sites, with a view to understanding whether the much celebrated tag driven folksonomy really makes Flickr the easiest place to find images. Today I am looking at a service called Slide. Slide has seen a marked growth in popularity in the first half of this year, and, according to Hitwise in the USA, in June 2006 it was the ninth most popular photo sharing site,...
August 3, 2006
Using image search on Photobucket
Flickr is generally held up by the chattering blogosphere classes to be the epitome of Web 2.0 goodness in terms of the development, API, user interface and feature set it offers. It always comes as a shock then to remember that not only are there other photo-sharing services on the internet, but that there are quite a few who are more successful than Flickr in terms of the numbers of members and number of images stored. One of Flickr's great...
July 25, 2006
How Vox handles audio, books and photographs
Yesterday I was looking at Six Apart's preview of their new Vox blogging and online social networking tool. At first glance I felt it was little more than a re-hash of existing products but with a more up-to-date client-side interface, but the functionality around collecting and sharing objects other than blog posts and comments looked to go a little deeper. Vox promises to 'play nicely' with third party software to make it easier to gather all of your online content...
July 24, 2006
Looking at Six Apart's new Vox service
Like many people with some kind of Six Apart account, over the last week or so I've been trying out the preview of their new Vox service - you can find what little I've posted at currybet.vox.com. To get something off my chest straight away, I'm with Dave on the spelling issue - it really bugs me that the social network feature of the service is spelt incorrectly for anyone outside of the U.S.A. I know spelling isn't my greatest...
July 18, 2006
Searching The Sun online - part two
I have returned to looking at search on The Sun's online site, as the situation has changed slightly since I took my first look at the site a couple of weeks ago. At that point England were still participating in the 2006 FIFA World Cup, and it appears that The Sun were using a different masthead design for the duration of the competition, which impacted on the placement of the search boxes that I recorded. The masthead on the homepage...
July 13, 2006
Surveying search across British online newspapers
Over the last couple of weeks I have been surveying the online search facilities offered by British newspapers, and this post gathers together my conclusions and a table of features across the market. In all I looked at 13 newspaper sites: Daily Express Daily Mail Daily Star Financial Times The Guardian The Independent The Mirror The Scotsman The Sun The Sunday Sport The Telegraph This Is London The Times On the whole I found relevancy across the market sector to...
July 12, 2006
Searching The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. In this last look at individual papers I'm focussing on two of the lesser-selling and frankly less serious newspapers on the British market, The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport. The Daily Star is generally seen as Britain's third red-top tabloid, after The Sun and The Mirror, although in recent years it has been gaining ground on them both...
July 11, 2006
Searching The Daily Express
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. Today I want to look at the British paper most likely to feature Diana, Princess of Wales or house prices on the front page - The Daily Express. From the homepage of the Daily Express search is offered over the web, or over the Thomson Local directory, using a radio button selection mechanism. The search results feature a title,...
July 10, 2006
Searching The Financial Times
Over the last couple of weeks I have been evaluating the search services offered by the online editions of British newspapers. Today I want to look at the specialist financial paper - The Financial Times. FT.com has had a considerable amount of investment during the years, and was one of the earliest newspapers in the UK to move to a paid-content model online. Search from the Financial Times homepage is via a box underneath the masthead. The actual results from...
July 7, 2006
Searching The Scotsman
I've been surveying the strengths and weaknesses of site searches across a number of British newspaper web sites, and today I'm going to look at a newspaper which isn't seen as one of the major national newspapers south of the border, but which is one with a significant and well developed online presence - The Scotsman The user can reach the site's search facility by following a link on the navigational toolbar. Selecting this link takes the user to the...
July 6, 2006
Searching The Telegraph
I've been surveying the search services offered by British online newspapers, and today I am looking at the search on the site of one of the newspapers that has fiercely stuck to years of broadsheet tradition - The Telegraph. The Telegraph offers a search in the navigation menu that sits underneath the masthead on their homepage. The search defaults to site search, but via a radio button mechanism the site also offers a Google branded web search. The search engine...
July 5, 2006
Searching The Guardian
Over the course of the last week or so I have been looking at how search works across various different British newspaper websites. Today I am looking at the search service offered online by The Guardian. Search from The Guardian's homepage is positioned near to the top right-hand corner of the homepage, above the masthead. Search engine results from The Guardian include the title of an article, the publication origin, the authors name and a date stamp. There is also...
July 4, 2006
Searching The Daily Mirror
Over the course of the last week or so I have been looking at how search works across various different British newspaper websites. Yesterday I looked at The Independent's search systems, and today I am going to return to red-top tabloid territory, with a look at the Daily Mirror. Mirror.co.uk didn't get into my good books to start with, as an invasive advert for Currys prevented the page from rendering properly in Firefox, which meant that I had to fire...
July 3, 2006
Searching The Independent
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. Last week I looked at the site searches offered by The Times, The Sun, The Daily Mail, and The Evening Standard's This Is London. This week I'm starting with a look at search on The Independent. Search on The Independent's homepage is accessed by a small box towards the top right-hand corner of the page. It doesn't seem to...
June 30, 2006
Searching 'This Is London' from The Evening Standard
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. I've already looked at a couple of News International Titles - The Times and The Sun - and one of Associated New Media's properties - The Daily Mail. Today I'm going to look at another Associated New Media site, This Is London, the online presence of the Evening Standard. Although the Evening Standard is not a national newspaper I...
June 29, 2006
Searching The Daily Mail
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. I've already looked at a couple of News International Titles - The Times and The Sun - and now I'm going to look at one of the Associated New Media properties - The Daily Mail For a long time the Daily Mail's online site carried a very sparse amount of content, and had some hideously intrusive advert technologies that...
June 28, 2006
Searching The Sun online
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. The quality of the results, and the usability of the interfaces, varies widely across the market sector. I thought I'd look at each newspaper I studied in turn, and give a little review of the features, usability and accuracy of their search facilities. I started yesterday with a look at The Times online, and now I'm looking at another...
June 27, 2006
Searching The Times online
I've recently been doing a survey of how well search works, or doesn't, across a number of British newspaper web sites. The quality of the results, and the usability of the interfaces, varies widely across the market sector. I thought I'd look at each newspaper I studied in turn, and give a little review of the features, usability and accuracy of their search facilities. I started with The Times online. The Times default search is a site search, although the...
June 22, 2006
Usability issues with OTEnet's On Wireless wifi service at Athens airport
My recent trip to Germany to see Switzerland versus Togo in the World Cup meant I spent Tuesday trying to get from Dortmund back to Hania in time to see England play Sweden. It also meant I got to try out the wi-fi facilities at two different airports, with very mixed results. In Frankfurt, it seemed the whole airport is covered by a T-Mobile wireless network. This was very simple to log-in to. You could purchase access in 15 minute...
May 31, 2006
Looking at Edgeio
Edgeio has been much touted as a neat web 2.0 application that takes listings a step ahead of the currently prevalent eBay model. I wanted to have a look at how it might have improved on that very successful model. I was very impressed with one little widget during the sign-up process. The first form element you have to fill in is your username, and then you gradually go down to set a password and give your email address. Even...
May 18, 2006
Trying out T3h Blox0r - part two
I've been testing online RSS aggregators, to see if any of the services out there are able to tempt me away from Bloglines. Yesterday I started looking at T3h Blox0r, and have so far found it a bit short of my requirements - notably it doesn't extract data from the RSS, but displays the original site in a small frame, regardless of whether it can shrink to less than 500px wide or not. One thing that I found strange was...
May 17, 2006
Trying out T3h Blox0r - "The best online aggregator ever!" - allegedly
I've been testing online RSS aggregators, to see if any of the services out there are able to tempt me away from Bloglines. So far I have had a look at FeedLounge, and Rojo and Google Reader. Next up is T3h Blox0r. T3h Blox0r is a web-based aggregator with a 5tup|d1y spelt name for the Firefox browser. On the plus side T3h Blox0r is open-source - so at least I could potentially get in and fiddle with the bits I...
May 12, 2006
Testing Google Reader - part two
I've been auditioning online RSS readers as potential replacements for Bloglines. Yesterday I started taking a look at Google Reader, and have been distinctly unimpressed so far. I liked the concept of being able to use search to find types of content that I might want to subscribe to, but I found in practice it was lacking some finesse, and actually became quite frustrating. For example, searching for RSS content about Doctor Who bought up the expected feeds from Outpost...
May 11, 2006
Testing Google Reader
I've been testing online RSS aggregators, to see if any of the services out there are able to tempt me away from Bloglines. So far I have had a look at FeedLounge, and Rojo. Next on my radar is the Google Reader. Technically it still claims to be a beta service, but then, so do products like Google News and Google Mail which have been "in beta" for some considerable time. When I first logged into the service using my...
May 9, 2006
coComment - a solution to a problem I didn't know I had? - part two
Yesterday I started looking at a public beta of a system called coComment, which seems to be a solution to a problem that I wasn't aware I had - that I can't currently follow the response to any comments I have left around the web without clicking back on all of the sites. From an architecture point of view they seem to have a nice balance in the system. Although they need a central architecture to maintain the "your conversations"...
May 8, 2006
coComment - a solution to a problem I didn't know I had?
I've been taking an interested look at coComment over the past few weeks. It seems like a reasonably neat solution to a problem that I wasn't aware I had - namely that unless I make the effort I can't follow the response to any comments I have left around the web. It was launched as a beta in February of this year - and speaking to one of the team it seems it took them around five months to get...
May 3, 2006
Exploring Rojo - part three
I've been auditioning online RSS readers as potential replacements for Bloglines. In part one of my exploration of Rojo I looked at getting feeds in and out of the system, and in part two I looked at the feed-reading experience itself. This final part will mostly concentrate on the tagging and topic aggregation features of the site. One of Rojo's boasts is that because of the 'Mojo' system, it is able to aggregate user reading behaviour to produce categorised lists...