Come On Washington Post, Get It Together

Like the Redskins: Great idea, poor execution

Back in September, just a couple of games into the 2010 season, the Washington Post launched an iPhone app called Football Insider, a brilliant play designed to bolster the flow of eyeballs to what is already consistently the most popular topic of coverage for the paper, the Washington Redskins.

A great appliance app in concept and basic design, Football Insider pipes Redskins related content in three categories: stories, game coverage and photos. Stories are subdivided into blogs, featuring Redskins Insider, DC Sports Bog and Hard Hits with LaVar Arrington, articles from the print edition and columns; game coverage includes play by play, box score and general info like weather and for home games traffic and stadium transit; the photos are the same galleries as the paper publishes with game recaps.

Considering how much of my time is spent F5ing Redskins Insider I downloaded it immediately then with the use of a handy black app called Rename, relabeled it simply Redskins.

The 1.0 version was terrible, it kept crashing from the game menu and I stopped using it. Version 1.0.1 came out a few weeks later and not only featured the spiffy image of Donovan McNabb as you see above, the 1.0 version simply had a generic burgundy helmet with no Redskins logo, the app also... started working. No problems, no crashes, could access all menus and all content would refresh as expected.

About three weeks ago version 1.0.3 appeared and I upgraded, immediately problems came back, new annoying problems.

It crashes, most notably when I move from the stories section to the games section, though not as often as the 1.0 version. The most annoying thing is the app's inability to refresh itself. Under versions 1.0 and 1.0.1, when you switch away from the app and come back, it respawns, you see the splash image of Donovan as the menus are refreshing content.

Now, once you open it and then switch away and come back, the app takes you straight back to the content menus, not the splash page, which would be fine if the content updated automatically, BUT IT DOES NOT. In order to get the menus to refresh, I either have to go through the annoying process to shut down a rogue app, or restart the whole phone. Occasionally after a crash it will respawn and not be able to reestablish its data connection, hence the image above, in these cases I hit the Home button then go back to the app and oh yep everything is just fine again.

Cannot get much in the way of support either, the Support link on the iTunes online page for Football Insider links back to generic Washington Post help page, if there is a thread or a topic on the Football Insider app then I am not able to find it easily.

Maybe I should not bother expecting a decent app until I get a decent team.



Screencap of aborted app load by me.