The Drudge Report App Update Is Mostly A Step Back

Since The Drudge Report uncovered Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in the late 1990s, the website has remained quite popular. It provides quick links for news on politics, entertainment, and current events. Now, the universal Official Drudge Report app for the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad has been updated with mixed results. When released earlier this year, the app was little more than a web browser. From the Drudge Report home page, users clicked on links as they would using another mobile browser such as Safari. All that has changed with version 2.0. Created by CodingByMoonLight, the updated Drudge app includes many nice features. But overall, I found it to be a huge disappointment. The Official Drudge Report app now includes integration with social networking sites and the ability to share articles on your personal blogs. You can do this if you have a Blogger, TypePad or WordPress-powered site.

The app also includes a centralized area where Drudge Report-specific links are located. These include articles from the Web Drudge Report, Mobile Drudge Report, or Mobile Friendly Sources, among others.

You can also see an updated list of the headlines that received Drudge’s famous Siren alert. Very nice. However, most of the app's new features are confusing. For example, as you move from page to page, you are shown a translucent waiting screen page. This shows mundane details such as the time it takes to process and render the requested page. Who cares if it takes 1.843 seconds to load a page? This happens every time you go from one page to another. I got so annoyed with this "feature" that I ended up browsing The Drudge Report website using Safari instead.

The app also contains an open window feature. This is supposed to be a quick way for users to revisit pages. I like the concept, but its execution needs to be improved. Finding which pages were actually open was a chore, and took too much time. Finally, the app does not have Retina display resolution when used on an iPhone 4. This limitation alone is enough to turn off many users. The app's creators attempted to create an "all in one" webpage application. What you are left with are a few nice enhancements coupled with other ones that make the app itself unusable. Overall, the Official Drudge Report app is worth checking out, if only because it is free. It definitely gives mobile users a different way to surf the web. Still, most of its new features make the app pretty bad. So much so, that its creators would be wise to rethink the entire concept.

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