by ★ The Daily Wait
[Via Daring Fireball]
I’ve been reading The Daily each day since its debut Wednesday. Three days, three issues. My opinion of it has declined each day. Until I see an updated version of the app, I’m done with it. I noticed yesterday that it took way too long to load the day’s new issue. Today, I timed it. From the time I tapped the icon on my home screen until I could read a single page, today’s issue took one minute and twenty seconds. And to be clear, that was over a reasonably fast Wi-Fi connection.
One minute, twenty seconds. For over a minute of that time, this is all that I saw. At that point, it’s already a lost cause. There’s nothing the actual content or interface of the app can do to make up for the fact that it takes way too long to see anything at all. Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who. And I suspect that’s who’s going to read The Daily, unless they fix this, and soon.
For comparison’s sake, I timed The New York Times iPad app. That took about 25 seconds to load today’s issue. A lot less time than The Daily, but, still too long. I realized that the delay before being able to read it was the reason I’d slowly stopped using The NYT iPad app over the last few months.
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I agree that waiting to see any content is a pain. I really want to open and start reading. Flipboard lets me do this. It also has more interesting tidbits of news from the web. Because it not only provides quick entryways to to Twitter and Facebook accounts but also specific magazines and journals, it provides me a much greater customized news aggregator than The Daily.
The Daily reminds me very much of Time Magazine, except every day, not once a week. The only really compelling thing it has had was the video of Giffords, that was just lucky. It is not any sort of new media. It is simply the old media on a daily basis and in digital form.
But a big thing for me is the lack of outgoing links. The articles are written like USA Today ones, short with little real detail. In an era when there is no scarcity in space – there are no paper costs – why is every article so short and why are there no links to any other source or site for information. The only ones I saw were advertising. How about when reviewing apps for the iPad, have links to the apps to download? Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t.
They have a blurb about a PDF at Verizon’s website but no link to the page.
I stopped reading newspapers online that refused to provide external links. from inside the article. I will do the same for The Daily.
The other thing I do not like is re-reading an article the next day. Old issues just disappear. How to I track them down if I want to re-read them? Not very easily. Luckily someone has done this, something the Daily should have had from day 1. As a subscriber, I should have easy access to ALL the content, not just today’s and that content should be easily deliverable INSIDE the app.
This is basic stuff. Every day The Daily gets less and less compelling for me.
And do not get me started on how many times it has crashed. More than any other app I have ever had.
A Man With A Ph.D. 
I share your sentiment about THE DAILY. I had very high expectations, too, probably sky-high. Three days later, I’m firmly back on terra firma. Day two, it had a bug that prevented any article from being shared via Faebook or Twitter. Hopefully things will be much better after the two-week trial period.
I’ve gone back to Flipboard as my main ‘newspaper’. By following the right people on Twitter, I get a very personalized set of information. But I can also subscribe to journals such as Nature and Science, or use Google Reader to really get a lot of information aggregated, all displayed in a pleasant fashion and most of high interest to me.
I flip through The Daily in less than 15 minutes. I have never gotten through everything on Flipboard. I would easily pay a subscription to them to get even more access to some news. But not for the meager amount I get from The Daily.
Flipboard is the way of the future, leveraging modern technology to provide information in a novel way. The Daily is not.
Sometimes Steve Jobs is wrong, at least in public. The behind the scenes stuff with the Segway indicates he was really upset, as only Steve can be. I would not be surprised that something similar happened here. I wonder if he would have shown up for the hype if he had been healthy?