San Francisco Chronicle for Pc

UPDATE #2 Six months later none of these issues have been addressed. Reluctantly canceled my subscription on May 13. UPDATE: two months after I submitted this review, the same problems (missing features, no search function, etc.). Today I have to find these features by searching the Internet (where I end up reading Mick LaSalle’s column on the sites of competing newspapers, even though the SF Chron is his home). I still rate this app one star because there is no lower designation. (Complaints in my original post are detailed below.) Two features that regularly drew me to the previous app were the Ask Mick LaSalle column, and the horoscopes (especially Sunday’s Minerva feature). The latter might sound silly, but checking the horoscope was a fun daily ritual, followed by reading articles of interest. Now that there is no daily horoscope, I’m out of the habit and ease of visiting the Chron app at all (I’m not going to invest the extra time in looking it up and reading the paper on my laptop at work). Similarly the Ask Mick LaSalle column – if I happened to miss it, very easy to enter it in the search field, and then I’d stick around reading other items – but now it’s inaccessible, unless I happen to visit the app the day it’s published. I’m sure your intent wasn’t to shift daily readers to an occasional rare visit, but at least in my case, that’s the result.

The new SF chronicle app is unbelievably worse than the prior app. It is hard to find at a glance which articles I want to look at. Prior app much better. Also there is no search feature? What kind of news app doesn’t have search?? Very bad. And I can’t access horoscopes. Did they forget to put a link? There is perhaps a lack of alignment in terms of how the paper sees itself and how the users see it. I’d rather see this versus many of the articles. Fix it now!!

Two major problems: first, there is no search function (or at least it's not easily found). Second, the front page and subsequent pages/sections are populated by old articles. Nothing like opening the Local News section on January 2 to find out about public transportation options for New Years Eve - an article that ran two days prior and is now totally irrelevant. I read the newspaper to find out about NEWS (that's why it's not called an oldspaper). C'mon Chronicle...if you're committed to delivering online news, prove it. If you're not committed, then stop publishing an online edition.

Developers, PLEASE read and fix the link to subscription fixture! This app is poorly designed, it consistently reminds me I only have “3 free stories left this month | get access” but I have linked this app to my subscription countless times. It has gotten so irritating that I am tempted to cancel my subscription. The new format is “OK”, but we still are unable to access prior papers and certain stories seem to linger on the Front Page for days. It would be nice to have access to an archive of the prior published papers. On a positive note, the vault is an interesting section, especially the vault photographs.