Nokia Channels: usage statistics & key improvements based on your feedback

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Nokia Channels: usage statistics & key improvements based on your feedback

Fri, 2007-12-21 12:42

Guest writer: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service. Download here.

Image: improved Nokia Channels user interface.

Dear all,

The

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Submitted by on 04-01-2008 01:21.

The program crashes if tabs are changed quickly twice.

"My headlines" should not show headlines for non-existing content.

The main view shows incorrect hints for navigation soft keys.

Do you want comments about the channels' content and presentation?

Helsingin Sanomat seriously needs a headlines view. With 30+ articles under one section, and pressing wrong button sends back to menu and opening the section again starts from article 1, plus the Channels program being as slow as a turtle, it's a major pain to know all about the news. Also, the "sub-articles" connected to the main news story should be somehow connected in Channels as well, not just in random order like they are now. Compare to the web site.

EuroNews should be splitted into multiple channels, one for each language, or better yet, make it possible to only "subscribe" the languages you're interested in. Poor Portuguese, needing 5 button presses just to change to their language version.

Talentum... like I said, their news are not worth all the 6 channels they have.

The Sun has some scroll bar issues.

General: Having two levels of "tabs" is confusing and unusable. Take EuroNews as an example. You scroll to the bottom of the list of English "News" section, and then you want to change to read the "Economic News" section. So you press the "right" key. What happens? Yes, you just changed to the French version.

Submitted by on 07-01-2008 23:02.

Hi Kanta,
thanks for your comments!

Quick comments/questions:
** The program crashes if tabs are changed quickly twice.
tt: Using which tabs does this happen (and what terminal)? we could not reproduce this with upcoming Beta4 build.

Submitted by on 08-01-2008 18:51.

** The program crashes if tabs are changed quickly twice.
tt: Using which tabs does this happen (and what terminal)? we could not reproduce this with upcoming Beta4 build.

This happens with the tabs of Euronews etc. Change multiple tabs rapidly and it crashes.

Submitted by on 21-12-2007 14:17.

Looking forward to the coming versions. Sounds like there'll be very good improvements.

After commenting about the duplicate/empty news categories, which indeed was problem with HS, I noticed this problem is also with the All channels view, which shows duplicate/empty categories in the By genre view.

About the headlines view, you should make it show more than one line of the header text even when the header is not selected. This would make it easier to browse the headlines, when you could actually see more than two words. This can't be an issue with font/screen size, but the program design.

Unicode support is highly appreciated. Now we only need Unicode support to your phones to actually read the news (and the web and emails etc.). Pretty please? I'll be happy when I can read e.g. the front page of Wikipedia without unknown character boxes (or the phone just crashing).

Background downloading would be very useful not only for headlines, but also for the channels themselves, especially when in slow network and 1MB of data to download.

I guess it's not your decision, but could you please ask Talentum to set up just one channel containing all the few "news" they now are scattering all over the place with their 6 channels.

Submitted by on 18-02-2008 14:19.

How is Channels moving forward? I have been waiting for the next betas and would like to know when can I expect to see something new.

Submitted by on 21-02-2008 10:14.

Like Scott I would like to know when this is coming out - I really like it and the old service [Kanavat] is not working properly. Can we have an update in the situation?

Submitted by on 25-03-2008 20:35.

Dear all,

Our deepest apologies for the long delay in releasing the Beta4 but our sw team has really been struggling hard to overcome some of the major issues we encountered with taking the systems fonts into use.

Today, most of the issues have been solved and we were finally able to package a well working and stable release into production.

I will shortly write a new blog thread to describe some of the new features, latest changes and new content that we have recently published. Naturally, latest sw release notes are also available at this site.

The next sw build, release Beta5, is scheduled for 10.4 and it is well on its way! As highlights Beta5 shall feature for the first time a true content background update and a much simplified user interface!

yours truly,
-the team

Submitted by on 26-03-2008 16:33.

"Platform fonts with UNICODE support."

Every application should support Unicode, so this is not really improvement. The real problem is, however, that the platform fonts of Nokia phones do not include the needed Unicode characters and instead just show "unknown character boxes". Really lame, feels like stepping into a time machine and warping 15 years back in time. Provide proper Unicode support on your phones. Then not just Channels, but also the Web browser and E-mail client etc. would be usable on your phones.

Also, the mess with "special" characters has not been solved with this change. Just look at The Sun.

Furthermore, this version draws just one headline or 4 lines of article in a second, feels unbelievably sluggish and slower than previous version.

Submitted by on 31-03-2008 13:27.

This is now beginning to look very good!

Thank you!

Nokia Connecting People

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Nokia Channels: usage statistics & key improvements based on your feedback

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