Filed under: iPhone, First Look, App Review
First Look: ZenNews brings the news cloud to your iPhone
Zensify announced its latest app, ZenNews [iTunes link], this morning. It's basically an intelligent news aggregator, using algorithms to find "what's hot" from a variety of sources including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, the Guardian and more. It parses Twitter and other social mediums to figure out who's talking about what, and then creates a tag cloud of hot topics. There's an aggregated view combining all sources, or you can view a tag cloud for each source. You can toggle sources and/or categories on and off in the preferences.
If a keyword in the tag cloud reveals more than 5 articles, tapping it will drill down into another tag cloud, repeated until the keyword returns a list of 5 or fewer articles. View articles within ZenNews using the built-in webkit browser, or open them in Safari. You can always switch from the tag cloud to a list view for any page, and there's a default view titled "All News" which lists all the aggregated news (in list format) at once. You can drill down to specific topics in the Categories view, and see what's new/hot from all enabled sources for a single category. As you read, you can mark any article as a favorite, and view a list of your marked articles in the Favorites view. You can quickly share articles via Twitter or email, as well.
It's all quite slick, and pretty solid for a first release. I did run into a bug which would bring up blank tag cloud pages if a specific combination of being on a certain view and losing a network connection at the right time occurred. I spoke with the developers yesterday, and I'm confident they'll smooth out any wrinkles quickly.
Zensify is offering ZenNews for free. Their plan is to demonstrate the buzz-detecting algorithms, and then offer white-label versions -- using a subscription model -- to companies with a need for up-to-the-minute buzz tracking. For the rest of us, this is a good-looking and, as far as I've been able to tell, accurate way to see what's happening in the world at any given moment. Check out the gallery below for a preview, and grab a copy on the App Store.
Gallery: First Look: ZenNews
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
eye.surgeon said 12:40PM on 10-15-2009
Al Jazeera??? What the heck. They have less than a dozen news sources and they choose Al Jazeera as one of them? Jeesh. What about Pravda, they weren't available?
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quandmeme said 12:53PM on 10-15-2009
No, seriously. Check out Al Jazeera's (US site anyway). If I want opinion pieces I can check out the various big networks' sites, but if I just want to know what is going on I go to wikipedia if I want chronology but Al Jazeera if I want just an unspun overview. (Caveat: I've lived oversees so I may care more about international news than most Americans.)
puhsitch said 6:00PM on 10-15-2009
Really, what's wrong with Al Jazeera? It's always seemed to me that they take an objective approach to reporting the happenings in the world. With that along with the fact that here aren't too many independent news agencies in the Middle East, I think they make a pretty logical inclusion.
Greg said 8:23PM on 10-15-2009
Is anyone else having problems getting this app to work? I've downloaded it, and tap on it to start. the logo screen appears and the app shuts down.
???
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pl_svn said 8:07PM on 10-15-2009
on my 3Gs all I get is a splash screen followed by a crash :-(
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maradatscha said 8:27PM on 10-15-2009
getting the same on my ipod Touch 1st gen
Brett Terpstra said 9:10PM on 10-15-2009
It's running fine on my 3GS right now, OS 3.1.2. The screenshots in the gallery are all off of my iPhone, so I'm sure it works… at least for me.
Just out of curiosity, what version of the OS are you guys on? I'm not going to troubleshoot someone else's app, but I'd at least like to know if you're on 3.0 :).
pl_svn said 9:24PM on 10-15-2009
3.1.2, here, and still crashing after a couple of reboots
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pl_svn said 9:26PM on 10-15-2009
working, now, after third reboot and... some rest :-)
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eye.surgeon said 10:53PM on 10-15-2009
Yes when it comes to an objective world view, what comes to my mind first? Al Jazeera of course! I especially appreciate the special focus on the merits of holy jihad against the infidel which we just can't get here in the west, outside of CAIR of course.
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Nikax said 8:22PM on 10-19-2009
so, you've never taken a minute to actually read Al Jazeera's web site or even the Wikipedia article about them, have you? One of them funny furrin' soundin' names is real offputting, I'm sure. Maybe stick to USA Today, they usually keep it down to single syllable words.
Objective world view? From the news media? That's really what you're after? Good luck.