Apple News + on an iMac - why so painful?

Software
1

Is it just me?

I had nothing better to do so I signed-up for a free month of Apple News+.

Phone, iPad, fine. (although the range of publications here in the UK isn’t very inspiring…)

iMac… The formatting is truly hopeless. I can view the magazine contents, and click on a feature, but that’s it. The feature is then presented in a bizarre vertical format with tons of white space on either side; a sort of literary Alice in Wonderland tea party. I can’t browse the magazine, or even view it like a basic PDF. After every article I’m forced to return to the contents and find the next piece! I don’t see any ads, which is no bad thing, but it bears almost zero correlation to reading the publication in hard form.

Am I missing something major? I would have thought hitting the right cursor would move me on a page, like a PDF, but not here…

Thanks for any help in advance!

1 Like
3

The app just isn’t very good. If the content is provided essentially as a PDF, then it’s super annoying to read on, but even the stuff in the better format isn’t that much easier to read, or move around in.

Even with content in the better format - you are really locked into the magazine format. The Application needs to be redesigned, and maybe the content could shine.

4

No, but Apple News apparently is.

Take away the Texture content (which doesn’t interest me) and it is just another news aggregator. And not a particularly good one at that. The format, IMO, is hard to read and much of the information cannot be clipped to Instapaper, etc.

I prefer RSS and only open Apple News when someone sends me one of those aggravating https://apple.news links. And that doesn’t happen very often.

5

Thanks all. Great to hear dementia hasn’t set in. Yet.

1 Like
6

Just open it in any non-Safari browser; the link will pass you through to the actual article in your browser.

2 Likes
7

Too many magazines are just PDFs. Going between pages using ⌘[ and ⌘] is idiotic on my iMac and the magazines are too difficult to read on my iPhone. I don’t have an iPad. I also cannot read on my MacBookPro because it won’t run Mojave. And of course Apple loses 90% of the market because there is no Windows or even browser-based access.

However the magazines formatted for the service are nice to read (but for no searchability). At least as good as the dead tree versions.

8

In UK I have just discovered the RBdigital app. This is where you can borrow magazines. through your local library card.

It is truly astounding. Much better range of magazines and the formatting is amazing. You can view as a pdf or as specific articles in large text.

Also it is free…because it is linked to the library.