Circa News launched last year and caught the attention of many by the way it delivered news. The iPhone app has been updated with design changes, new features and lots of improvements.
Included in the update:
- Design Refresh – We've gone over every pixel with a fine toothed comb. The entire app's design has been cleaned up and we think it looks great! In addition to some of the design changes, we've also made some improvements to the fonts in an attempt to further improve readability.
- Featured Story Marquee – In previous versions of the app, we were only able to highlight one story per category. Sometimes on big news days (or weeks) we would have loved to have highlighted multiple stories. Well, now we can! Using our new marquee feature, we'll be able to highlight any number of stories.
- Share by email – Sharing by email has easily been one of our most requested feature. You asked for it, you got it! To share by email, just tap the share button within a story – it's that simple!
- Loading indicator – One issue with previous versions of the app is that it's been hard to tell when the app was refreshing. Not anymore! Now whenever the app is opened, you'll see a banner to let you know that it's checking for updates.
- Pull to refresh – Just as it sounds
- Swipe to go back – Also probably a bit obvious, but now when you're reading a story you no longer have to hit "back" to go back to the story list – just give it a swipe!
- Mark followed stories as read – When you're in the "My Followed Stories" section, you can now click the action button and mark all of the updates as read.
- Easily unfollow stories – If you've decided that you don't want to receive updates on a given story, while you're in My Followed Stories you can now just swipe that story to have the option to unfollow it.
- Performance! – We've made big improvements with how fast the app updates.
- Accessibility – We're working towards having full compatibility with accessibility options, but it will take some time. In the meantime, we've added quite a few labels that should make accessible naviation easier.
- App takes up less space – In an amazing feat, the app has already reached its New Years resolution and shed its holiday weight with 1.1. The app now takes up half as much space as before, and we've reduced its cache considerably.
- Unread updates to followed stories now at the top of the My Followed Stories list
- Fixed an inaccurate character count issue when sharing to Twitter
- "Sources" is now known as "Citations"
Circa News is available for free in the App Store [iTunes Link].