Boston.com’s iPhone app is nice, but it has some failings when it comes to being a good citizen on my iPhone. A good iPhone news app needs to work well with other apps on the iPhone, especially social media ones like Twitter and Facebook. Even better if they allow you to send articles to services like Evernote and Instapaper. The best apps pass along the article’s headline and a short URL to your preferred Twitter app or the Facebook app.
The Boston.com app offers a “Share” button at the bottom of the article.
Click on it and you get two options, Share with Facebook and Share with Twitter.
Click on the latter and you’ll either get a sign-in screen for the Twitter web site, if you haven’t logged in to the site from your iPhone recently, or you get your Twitter page with some filled-in.
The problem is that all it fills in is the headline of the article, not the URL. What use is that? If I’m tweeting an article, I want to direct people to it. If I just wanted to put up a headline, I could do that myself. The utility of the news app is to copy that which I can’t re-type, namely the URL.
One news app that does it right is Associated Press’s app, which offers to let you text it, email it, Tweet it, or send it to Facebook or Evernote.
