If you’re the type of person who found yourself waking up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat during the presidential election race, reaching for your iPhone to find out the latest campaign news from the 24-hour news cycle, you might wish they had released the free Huffington Post iPhone app last year.
The left-leaning news site and aggregated blog was always a bit of a challenge to digest on the iPhone, and this app unquestionably makes it an easier proposition.
Gone is the requirement of zooming in to read all of the articles, long load times and clunky graphics. In its place is a straightforward interface emphasizing quicker loading, readability and easy maneuvering between sections.
On a video test run, it took a reload for the video of Michelle Bachman getting heckled at a town hall meeting to run correctly, but the video of Anne Heche calling her ex a “lazy ass” on Letterman ran glitch-free.
The comments and sharing interface is seamless, allowing you to log in to your HuffPost account directly from the app to leave comments or into your FB account to share an article with friends.
One downside (besides, well, the content if you’re conservative) is the way the application integrates links from an exterior source. Each synopsis is presented as its own article and, when you click through the piece, it doesn’t allow you to switch to wide-screen orientation, regardless of how the article is formatted in its native publication.
For a free app, that’s hardly a deal breaker.
