If there is ever anyone left wondering how much the times have changed, maybe now they have one more reason to be convinced -News reading has gone digital.
Almost any and everyone who is the least bit tech-savvy, can now catch up with most of their news online real-time. That is another plus for living in our times. Without flattery, this creates a good enough context for our app of the week – NewsDrift, still continuing in our trend of Apps developed in Africa series.
Overview
NewsDrift is a news aggregator which helps to keep tabs on local and international news from various channels and different sources. It aggregates news from sources such as Kenya’s Daily Nation, The Star, Capital FM as well as international news channels such as NBC, Atlantic Wire, Forbes, Business Insider, Mashable, TechCrunch, CNET and many others.
Peculiar Problem It Solves
Keeping tabs on news from numerous sources is a problem in itself, not to talk of navigating the channels in search of relevant news listed. Truly, it can be a tiring endeavour. NewsDrift provides a solution to both problems and similar ones by traversing the different sources and gathering all the news bits for you in one place; making it available via an elegantly designed interface. Now it makes it much easier to stay up-to -date with the news while conserving your energy for other things.
Essence / Unique Feature
The NewsDrift app enables users to customize their own news sources. The latter, as well as providing support for offline reading (saving news articles for later reading) ultimately combine to deliver a robust reading experience on mobile. With its neatly crafted, simple and highly interactive interface, the user is able to intuitively navigate the different grids of news on display.
Value Proposition
Instead of having to visit multiple news outlets, NewsDrift brings information from all your favourite news sites and blogs into one place, for free. Designed with good enough social media integration, users can share interesting articles to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, all within the app.
Developed in Kenya, by Abel Massai, NewsDrift helps to say bye-bye to the days of buying numerous newspapers all in a bid to catch the latest news. In an interview with Abel, he mentioned that delivering a great user experience was top priority for him; as such the app would continually get refined, whilst they boldly try out new ideas.
Potential Coverage
Even though it has started well in Kenya, the application has the potential to get constant usage on the African continent, and with time it might just compete with any other news aggregator mobile application on the global scene.
Critique
Currently, it is only available on the android platform. It is hoped that it would be available on the other platforms such as iOS, windows and blackberry soon enough. Taking a cue from another user’s comment, maybe it could do with more news outlet listings.
Conclusion
The application features some very nice animation effects when swiping from one news story to another. This again delivers additional fun experience. Indeed Africa has come of age, and the continent is not left behind in the digital revolution. With such interesting applications as NewsDrift being churned out, we are truly on our way to providing global solutions rather than waiting for some others to take the initiative.
