France 24 - World News 24/7

The France 24 app offers news in 4 languages which is ideal for multilingual people or those who want to improve their language skills. Unfortunately, the latest versions of the app do not allow landscape mode in iPad forcing you to rotate your iPad to view it correctly. This is a poor use of screen space because half of the area remains static in portrait mode.

Other than delivering the news, the next most important feature for an app is efficient use of screen space. Phones don’t have a lot of room to read so it’s important for application developers to do everything they can to reduce the size of fixed buttons and banners and use pull-down menus for navigation. Not everyone is a bonehead snap-chatting millennial stuck in portrait mode. In the news thread mode, the “watch live” play button takes 20% of the screen space. After considering the wasted space elsewhere I feel like I’m reading with a screen the size of a ‘90s flip phone.