Nokia Channels: usage statistics & key improvements based on your feedback
Guest writer: Tatu T, the owner of Nokia Channels media service. Download here.
Image: improved Nokia Channels user interface.
Dear all,
The “still alive after one week – hooray!” mark has been passed with Channels service and it has been an interesting journey along the way. First of all, the service has attracted now way over 4000 unique users from 115 countries and 350+ different networks. Secondly, every day roughly 400 different people enjoy the available publications. It is also quite interesting to point out that every day out of those 400 different users 60% are returning users – ie. they have used the service some other day before. So it seems like people do like to come back, at least as long as our service can perform and has NO bugs…
… which nicely brings us to the topic of suggestions and ideas from You!
On 10th of Dec Bogdan wrote us about increasing the number of service providers. On Monday this week we converted few channels from the existing Finland pilot to new production system. These channels include publications from Talentum media: Arvopaperi, Markkinointi&Mainonta (M&M), Talouselämä, Tekniikka&Talous (T&T), Tietoviikko (TiVi), Talentum.com.
On 10th of Dec kanta wrote about the too small font size. Well, a new system fonts based version of the service has been implemented supporting both non-latin characters (Arabic, Thai, Chinese etc.) based publications but also allowing user to choose between five different font sizes (smallest, small, normal, large, largest). This feature is built into the coming Beta4 release.
On 11th of Dev Petteri V wrote about the badly needed page up and page down keys (with a press of number two or eight respectively). This has also been implemented to Beta4 release.
On 17th of Dec kanta wrote how Channels can’t be closed from Task List. This was due to a pending removal of app having been set as a system task (disabling user to cancel/close the process). This has been fixed for Beta4.
In order to make the splash page more appealing, we have added some flowers to it too 
Some new issues reported:
The incremental update is corrupting the data, ending up with duplicate/empty news categories and articles.
tt: To our understanding this must refer to issues seen in Helsingin Sanomat (Finnish feed). However, the abnormalities in the front page were not due to corrupted data but rather due to how the content feed was constructed on Helsingin Sanomat end. We have already been in touch with HS to correct the feed.
If content was downloaded text only, and then loading all content is switched on, perhaps the incremental download should be able to load the images also for already loaded text-only articles?
tt: This feature has been intentionally implemented with only future downloads in mind. I.e. in changing from “Load text only” to “Load all content” is designed not to “update” earlier loaded articles.
The ads interfere with the menu. The ad pops up and the ad link is followed when using and selecting an item from the menu.
tt: Known issue and being worked on.
Sorting headlines takes forever.
tt: Bear with this for a while. We have a much improved UI design/flow coming out in Beta5 together with background downloading+server sorting of headlines -> making instant entry to headlines view.
There should be more than 16 headlines shown.
tt: Yes, depends also on the “depth” of the content feed
The headlines view should be more compact. The full headline (or at least two-three lines) should always be seen without highlighting it. Remove the empty space and images and show more text.
tt: Let’s see what we can do about this. Available space for text is also controlled by physical screen size/dimension since platform fonts get rendered differently in different screens (they do not look the same nor do they consume the same space for same screen resolutions).
The order of the subsribed channels should be changeable, i.e. the order the tabs in My headlines and the order in My channels. So that the most used could be moved to first in the list, i.e. faster to use.
tt: This will be implemented in Beta5.
For some of Help the last lines of the text is not shown. Fix the incorrectly shown apostrophes as well.
tt: there could be a small bug here. Incorrect characters will get automatically fixed with system/unicode fonts.
So, this is the latest for Channels. We sincerely hope you keep on enjoying the service and stay tuned for the 1st of January Beta4 release: new publications coming live from Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and United Kingdom!
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008
Yours,
-tatu t
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.
Comment by kanta — December 21, 2007 @ 4:17 pm
[…] If you installed Nokia Channels when we last mentioned it, or simply have a new Symbian phone for Christmas, and are looking for interesting apps to install; Nokia have updated their Channels application. Full details of the usability enhancements and other changes on the Nokia Beta Website. […]
Pingback by Nokia Channels update | UK Gadgeteer Website — December 24, 2007 @ 2:23 pm
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.
Comment by kanta — January 4, 2008 @ 3:21 am
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.
** “My headlines” should not show headlines for non-existing content.
tt: The system should be able to retrieve also “outdated” archieved content. How did you experience this problem?
** The main view shows incorrect hints for navigation soft keys.
tt: Should be pretty much fixed on Beta4, however the main carousel is planned to disappear from Beta5 onwards.
** Newspaper media template/Helsingin Sanomat issues
tt: There is a plan to build in latest news and other related articles functionality into Newspaper template. A bit like what you experience with wap.hs.fi. Timeline still a bit open.
** Web media template/Euronews issues
tt: Maybe a quick fix would be to swap main and lower level tabs.
** The Sun has some scroll bar issues.
tt: Good observation. We are working on those!
wbr,
-tatu
Comment by Channels, Editor-in-chief — January 8, 2008 @ 1:02 am
** 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.
** “My headlines” should not show headlines for non-existing content.
tt: The system should be able to retrieve also “outdated” archieved content. How did you experience this problem?
Ah, now I understand. The system seems to cache old headlines and show also the old ones after current headlines, upto 16 items. Talentum channels only have 6 articles, so when they publish new article, the old cached headlines still fit into the max 16 items and are thus shown. But opening those old headlines doesn’t give any article.
Although I understand the idea of showing which articles you’ve already read, I don’t think however that it’s a good idea to show headlines to articles that no longer exist.
But if the system is supposed to cache the articles, too, then the caching is not working. But those cached articles should then be available also through the channel itself.
Comment by kanta — January 8, 2008 @ 8:51 pm
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.
Comment by Scott Beaumont — February 18, 2008 @ 4:19 pm
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?
Comment by Timo Kunnarla — February 21, 2008 @ 12:14 pm
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
Comment by Tatu T — March 25, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
“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.
Comment by kanta — March 26, 2008 @ 6:33 pm
This is now beginning to look very good!
Thank you!
Comment by Timo Kunnarla — March 31, 2008 @ 4:27 pm