New Bloomberg iPad App Review

Yesterday I was forced to update the Bloomberg App on my iPad, which I was a bit reluctant to do as the old one I thought was good, useful and fairly easy to use. The presentation of the old version looked good, maybe a little cluttered, but after a short time I really liked how I could get quickly get a good overview of markets, currencies and the latest news on one page.

After installing the latest version and running it my first impression was how I disliked the presentation, the previous app was dark, and easy on the eye, the new one has a lot of white and feels too bright. The new home screen does not give an overview of stock markets and currencies, which is something I liked in the previous version. Even when you go to the markets page, you cannot get a good overview, you have to select the area of interest from a drop down.

The overall screen layout feels as if it was designed for a phone and not a tablet. The previous version felt like a complete piece of software, this version feels like a basic or lite version.

While using the App it felt a little buggy, the refresh of currencies does not seem to work and I had to go out of the screen and back in for it to refresh correctly. I am not confident the graphs work correctly either (see image below), when looking at the performance of one stock it showed the month being "Feb 2017", with 31 days, the current date was the 1st so it felt the label for the month was incorrect and should have displayed "Jan 2017".

Overall this App feels like it has been rushed and has not go through the QA department correctly. I think they need to employ some UX designers to try to get the usability right, maybe they should also consider doing some end-user testing to get some feedback, the reviews on the app store are appalling, which is understandable. The previous version I would have rated 7/10, this new version I would give 2/10.

TV Guide app data usage very high

Recently I had a look at my mobile data usage on my Nexus 4 phone and was surprised to see in the last month the TV Guide app had used 100MB, this was surprising as I hardly use this app, the app size is only 2.2 MB so what else was using the data, I thought this was very strange and quickly removed the app from my phone. Think it would be nice for companies like this to tell users what they are doing that means high data usage when you are not actually using the app.

Outlook.com Android App Needs Fixing

I've updated my apps on my Nexus 4 phone and it removed the Hotmail app and updated it to the Outlook.com app. This was a big mistake, here are the reasons why this app is so awful.

• The font size from where the email came from is to large, this needs to be a setting.
• The background is white, with Hotmail it was black and looked better, this also needs to be a setting.
• Sent a single email to myself, 1 appear as expected on the web site, but I received 2 on the phone.
• Email from the app does not include the message signature.

Overall this app is very simple and does not feel as if it has been finished, Microsoft really should have done more testing and finished it before sending it out. I think it needs far more settings to enable the user to customise the look and feel. Poor show again Microsoft, please fix this app ASAP.

ITV Player for Samsung SMART TV

I have just downloaded the new ITV Player for my Samsung SMART TV, the menu system works well and I can see the programmes available, but when I select a programme to watch a progress clock appears in the top right hand side of the screen and then the TV switches itself off! I've tried a few times and it keeps happening, I think I will have to wait for ITV to fix an obvious issue with their app.