Guardian for iPad now allows section list customisation

Paul Haine, July 5, 2011

You can now add to, or remove from, the default set of sections that my Guardian webapp gets the latest news for. Previously there was a hard-coded list of sections, a fairly arbitrary list that was largely off the top of my head, missing Education, Law, Society, Football, Stage and a couple of others.

The default list remains, but now you should be able to see a settings icon up in the nav, as pictured below.

Tap that icon and you’ll get a section list to customise.

Caveat: the more sections you include in your list, the less likely it is that they’ll all be available offline. It looks as if I can comfortably save about 15–20 sections’ worth of data to the browser’s storage area; anything above that and the data will still be displayed but may not be available offline.

Another caveat: you’re currently obliged to have the front page in your list. There’s some work I need to do to allow you to select a default first page. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to ditch the front page.

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2 Responses to “Guardian for iPad now allows section list customisation”

1. Adam Wilcox says:

   July 6, 2011 at 10:57 am

   Hi Paul,

   Would the arrow buttons in the toolbar be better suited to page between ‘articles’ rather than ‘sections’, given that the dropdown box allows you to move between sections?

   Also– the toolbar and tweet stuff– would it be possible to get that to stick & float at the top of the page, similar to the way the toolbar stays stuck to the top of the screen within the Instapaper application? Currently when you get to the end of a story– you can kinda lost, and have to scroll to the top of the page again to do anything else.

   Just a few thoughts– otherwise I stand by my tweet that this “is so so good. It is better than any native newspaper app I’ve used.”
2. Paul Haine says:

   July 6, 2011 at 1:02 pm

   Thanks Adam,

   Probably a ‘yes’ to most of those suggestions. What’s there at the moment is basically the “I guess this will do for now” design. I’ve been gathering feedback on how people actually use it (plus how I use it myself) and will do a redesign that makes the whole thing more usable.

   It’s a nuisance that position: fixed is only enabled in iOS 5, as that would make my life a lot easier. I’ve been experimenting with JavaScript libraries like iScroll to get some fixed headers and footers in there but so far haven’t had much success.