Personalized News comes to iPhone!

Great News!  We have just launched Apollo News and Apollo Lite! (free app, but limits the number of news categories) for the iPhone.  Apollo News for iPhone brings all our personalization and news categorization technology to the palm of your hand.  Just like our iPad application, our iPhone App learns what you like to read about and makes sure to bring you the most relevant news articles.

We bring news from your friends, experts, and the best sources around the web about things that you are interested in.  Check it out!  and as always, we absolutely would love any feedback, suggestions or thoughts you might have.  You can email us anytime at info@hawthornelabs.com

Huge iPad App Update Just Launched

Apologies for the long delay between our last post and this one, but our team has been incredibly busy and has some great new updates to share.  This week we launched a new iPhone app and a big update to our iPad app.  We totally revamped the look and feel of the application and have a much more illustrative view, full of beautiful pictures in every category.  If you’d rather have a quick feed to skim the news, that view is also available.

There is also some great new technology that we have added.  Apollo now has the ability to find which of the tweets that you follow are relevant news and automatically knows what type of news they are to put them in the correct news category.  We can tell if somebody posts a sports article that you will like and will make sure that gets to the top of your sports page.  Similarly we do this with facebook posts that have news articles in them that you might be interested in.  Our goal is to find you the most relevant news for you… whether it is from your friends, from authors you like, or about topics you enjoy reading.  We will find it and bring it to you on Apollo.

As always, we absolutely love and appreciate any feedback that you have for us so please feel free to contact us anytime with thoughts, suggestions or just to say hi at info@hawthornelabs.com.

Screenshots:

Hawthorne Labs’ New Home

We have a new home at http://www.hawthornelabs.com thanks to an amazing company, Viaduct,  that designed, developed and finished the site in less than a week.  These guys are good.

Please take a look at it and let us know what you think and, as always, what we can do to make it better.

If you are looking for a site revamp or creation, I’d be happy to make the introduction.

Crashing Issues Fix Coming

We have heard from a small subset of users that some articles are causing crashes back to the main screen and have created what we hope is the fix and submitted to Apple.  We are now simply awaiting their approval.

In the meantime, if you would like to try the update immediately, please email us at admin@hawthornelabs.com and we can have you test the update now.

Also, other users have mentioned that doing a soft reset on their ipad fixed this problem (holding down the on/off button until it turns off… then hold down the same button again until it comes back on… then waiting 30 seconds).  See if that fix works as well.  Thanks for your patience.

New Categories: “Favorites” and “Trending”

You may have noticed that there are two new categories if you scroll all the way to the right on the category navigation bar of the main screen.  One category is “Favorites” which puts together all the most recent articles from the sources you have favorited and the second is
“Trending” which shows you which articles Apollo users have liked the most over the past day.  Please let us know what you think about these categories at admin@hawthornelabs.com.

Delighting our Customers

Our main priority at hawthorne labs is to delight our customers.

We have had a few users tell us they haven’t had a pleasurable experience with the app, either because it lacks certain features or because they have experienced the app crashing at certain times during usage.  We want you to know that “we are on it” and are working hard to continue to improve the application.  This is Version 1.0 and we very much appreciate all the suggestions and feedback we have heard as well as your patience.

We read every single email and will consider every idea, concern and suggestion.

If you are not satisfied, please tell us what we can do to make you LOVE the app.  Our number one goal is to delight our customers and help you discover all the best news and we won’t sleep until we do that.

One crash in the app is too many and we will soon have an update out that will hopefully make them nonexistent.  (And if it doesn’t, we will continue to update it, until it does).

As far as new feature requests, here are some of the items we have heard so far:

1) Instapaper 2) International Version 3) Category customization 4) New subcategories 5) Search Terms….  We would love to know any other ideas you have, in addition to these.  As always, feel free to email us directly at admin@hawthornelabs.com

Apollo Users: Click “+” to view Subcategories

Click “+” button by the titles of each category to see subcategories of the main categories.  There are currently 26 categories of news (with new ones being added).  For example, click on “+” on the  sports category to reveal four other sports categories of 1) Basketball 2) Baseball 3) Football and 4) Soccer.  Also, please email us at admin@hawthornelabs.com if you have any ideas on categories or subcategories you would like us to add.

See below for an example:

Vote to Influence Sources Shown

Up-voting or Down-voting articles will change which articles Apollo shows to you.  If you really like a source, hit the “thumbs-up” button (or favorite button if you want to add it to your favorites) in the upper right hand corner.  The more you up-vote a source, the more articles from that source that you will see.  Similarly, the more times you down-vote a source, the less articles from that source you will see.   Keep the suggestions coming!

You know where to reach us: admin@hawthornelabs.com

Video Functionality

We have heard that a few users are having problems watching videos within some of the articles.  We want you to know that we are working diligently and quickly to resolve this.  The issue is that the memory required to play some of the longer videos exceeds that of what the iPad allows and thus the app takes a user back to the main article view.  We do have a fix in the works it will be available soon in the next update.  Thanks for being patient as we continue to make the Apollo News Experience better.

Feedback Requested

First, we really appreciate all of the feedback and great comments we have received from users so far.  We want keep improving Apollo to make it an app that users truly love.  This is only version 1.0 and we plan on  constantly iterating based on your feedback.  If you have any features you would like to see, any fixes needed, or just to say hello, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: admin@hawthornelabs.com.  We can’t wait to hear from you!