Bing News - Pretty cool but still partly broken

[mitchellvii]

Have you tried the Windows 8.1 Bing Newsreader app? Pretty cool but a few things are still frustratingly broken:

1. The Share Charm doesn't work. Always says "There is nothing to share." How selfish! Lol. But anyway, yeah you can't share articles from it (which sucks).
2. Want to open an article in IE and share it from there? Nope, you can't open the article in IE either.
3. It gives you buttons for changing text style and size but apparently neither work.
4. You can't pinch to zoom text on same webpages and the text can be quite small.
5. Page loads seem to be MUCH slower than IE11. I thought these newsreaders were supposed to be loading linked articles in the background so they open pretty much instantly? Have had as much as 5 second wait times on fast wifi connection.
6. You can't select and copy text from articles. You can't highlight text. It's almost like it is a picture of the article and not the actual text being presented.

Other than that it is pretty cool. Hope these are things they are planning to fix.

** Update. Looks like all of the above issue were due to a bad install from the 8.1 Preview. If you are having similar problems, just uninstall and install again and everything should be great!

 

[tonyz3]

FYI.....i would think about uninstalling a reinstalling the app because all of theses things work for me in SP and RT versions.. 1 share works even gives option to share to reader app, #2 what do you mean about this one. 3 i can adj text style and fonts, 5 pages load quickly. 6 quick tap on the screen highlights text for select and copy funct.

 

[mitchellvii]

FYI.....i would think about uninstalling a reinstalling the app because all of theses things work for me in SP and RT versions.. 1 share works even gives option to share to reader app, #2 what do you mean about this one. 3 i can adj text style and fonts, 5 pages load quickly. 6 quick tap on the screen highlights text for select and copy funct.

Huh, will do, maybe just a bad install.

What I mean by #2 is that it doesn't give me an option to open the page in an alternate browser, but again that may be a bad install.

** Update - Yep, everything works GREAT now. Was just bad install (weird, since I didn't actually install it, 8.1 did). Lovin it now, thanks!

 

[ArnoldC]

I like it too, presentation is neat and useful.

 

[tonyz3]

I don't remember seeing the option to open in browser on mine, do you have that now ion yours....glad it works, it is nicely put together.

Sent from the SurfaceForums.net app for Windows 8

 

[ArnoldC]

I don't remember seeing the option to open in browser on mine, do you have that now ion yours....glad it works, it is nicely put together.

Sent from the SurfaceForums.net app for Windows 8

Likewise...

 

[mitchellvii]

I don't remember seeing the option to open in browser on mine, do you have that now ion yours....glad it works, it is nicely put together.

Sent from the SurfaceForums.net app for Windows 8

Nah still no option to do that. Wish there were so I could bookmark a page I like. Maybe you can share it with the Reader app and bookmark it there?

 

[ArnoldC]

I tried it various ways, and won't give us a link to a website. Essentially when you share a news article, it takes the first paragraph, or less for Twitter for example, and a link-back to Bing News.

 

[tonyz3]

You can share it to the reader app. but not sure how many options the reader app has as far as bookmarking.

 

[mitchellvii]

Yeah it seems they are trying to seal us into the Bing News Ecosystem here. Odd that they don't even want us interfacing with IE 11. This is and has always been MS #1 problem, SILOING. Groups that develop these different products do so on separate little islands and don't really communicate so instead of a true "Suite" of products that works seamlessly, you get something that was clearly patched together at the end by another department that designed neither.

Perfect example is Access and Word Visual Basic Coding - they do NOTHING the same way. One would think as part of an Office "Suite" they would be similar but you would be wrong.

By trying to "seal me in" Microsoft will end up "sealing me out" and I will just use IE 11 for getting my news (as bookmarking interesting pages has been known on occasion to be useful). They can't have done something this dumb accidentally so it must be on purpose and that is truly a little scary. All they need is a simple, "Open in browser" button. Nope. On purpose.

 

[pallentx]

I also like that you can make it a "big" tile on the start screen so it shows the top three headlines and a nice-sized photo.

 

[cauzion]

On Windows RT 8.1 Preview, the "view on browser" button was removed.

I really miss it. There are some features, specially comments on some websites where you can not log in on the site from the Bing News Apps and you can't just open the article on a browser as before.

Carlos Trindade
http://SurfaceRtReview.BlogSpot.com