Using the iOS News App

The News app is a new app from Apple for the iPad and iPhone that comes with iOS 9. It aggregates news articles from channels and topics that you choose and shows them in a format that is generally more readable than the web. You can customize your sources, save favorites and view your history.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On today's episode let's take a look at the new News app in iOS 9.
The News app is new for iOS 9. It is created by Apple and it is part of the default set of apps that you get with your iPhone or iPad. Basically it is an aggregator that will allow you to view news articles from all sorts of sources over the internet. It will put it together in one interface. So you can browse through all the news that is important or interesting to you.
So if this is the first time running the News app it is going to start with a series of welcome screens. It is going to ask you to choose three different news sources or topics that interest you. Now you will be able to customize this later so you can quickly pick some just to get started.
You will have several different screens here. You can access each one at the bottom. I, right now, have the one at the left selected for you. This is where you go to read your news. It basically takes all the sources you've selected and puts them altogether. It shows you recent stuff and interesting stuff and you can scroll through it.
Now if you want to read something you would just tap on the picture or headline and it will go into that specific article. Now you have this special view where you can read the article. What you get here really depends upon the source. Some sources will actually go to great lengths to do special things to fit Apple's News format and show things really nicely. Other ones might show just the text of the article or the text and a picture.
So you are going to be getting different levels of quality in terms of what you will be seeing but for the most part you are going to get pretty ad free, or just a small number of ads, on this screen. It will be easy to read stuff.
Also you've got the ability to Bookmark things and Like things and Share things.
So the Bookmark function, at the upper right, that saves it and now I will actually be able to access that later. So we'll take a look and see how this one appears later. If I hit the Like button there, the love button, that will tell the news app that they should feature more articles like these on my main For You page. Then the Share button has a typical set of share features. You can send links to people through Messages, Mail, and Twitter, and things like that. You can add to your Safari reading list or open this in Safari. Every news article has a web page equivalent and sometimes there will be more content on the web for some sources or sometimes you just want to go to the original web page. So you can do that. You can also just add more as extensions become available.
Now in addition to just seeing everything in the For You page you can go into Favorites. You can actually see the sources you have chosen. So these may be the ones you chose in the beginning. You can use the Edit button to easily get rid of a source or you can dive down into a source just by tapping on it. 
So this will show me, it looks just like the For You page, but it will show me only articles from that one source.
Then I can go to Explore. Explore is the opposite end of that. I can look through Suggested Channels and Suggested Topics. It is important to realize there are two separate things here. Channels will be a specific news source like say NY Times or something. Where Suggested Topics will be things like, you know, social media, or politics, or health. So if you add a Suggested Topic you may see all sorts of articles from all over the place from different sources.
You can scroll down to the bottom here and you can browse more topics. So there are tons of topics you can dig deep into each one and you can kind of get a preview here. If I look at science it is going to show me different science sources for instance.
If I look at News it will show me different news sources. 
I can also search for sources. Use the Search button there at the bottom and I can type something here at the top to search for it. It will give me sources that match by name, sources that match by topic, channel names, all sorts of things in here. I can select one and add it. So for instance if I want to add MacRumors I can add that from the search screen here. I can also select it and just go directly into it. So this gives me the ability to just see a preview of what I would normally get if I looked at the content.
The last button at the bottom is Saved. This has two different sections. First are things that I have Bookmarked. So you can see there is that article that I Bookmarked and I can go back to it. It is very handy to be able to do that. So if you see a long article and you want to get to it later or save up some things for some weekend reading you can do that. 
You also have History which will show you all the different articles that you have looked at recently. You have a Clear History button at the upper left. But this is great if you've read something earlier and you want to refer to it later and you didn't think to Bookmark it or anything you can just go back and see which articles you read.

Comments: 14 Responses to “Using the iOS News App”

Larry

9 years ago

In the old 8. app, why are there some notification badges that just don't turn off, no matter how much you update each of the mags / feeds, etc. and does IOS 9 version do the same thing?

Gary Rosenzweig

Not sure what you mean as there was no iOS 8 version of this app. It is new as of iOS 9. Perhaps you were using a third party app? I haven't observed any badge issues with the News app.

Jan E. Wille

Is 'News' for US version only? - I can't find on my Norwegian iOS9-devices.

US only for launch, other countries coming soon.

karen

figures

jonathan

Yep, I was looking also...

Charles Alma

Ditto for Australia. Any indication on release dates for International versions? And what happens if a US-based user comes to visit us? Can they still use this in Australia?

I believe it is based on your language settings, or possibly your iCloud account location. So someone in the US would be able to use it anywhere. As for release dates, Apple never seems to announce those in advance. Plenty of similar third-party apps if you want something like this.

B.Warwick

Why do I have to suffer News items from the USA that has no local interest with living in England?

Carlos

Is "News" available on the iMac too or limited to IOS devices?

It is an iOS 9 app. So no Mac version. I suppose if it does well, like iBooks, then Apple may make a Mac version.

Paul

News app has some real catching up to do with Flipboard? Too busy and don't see me changing.

Gary Ward

Thanks, learned how to really use with you help!

sandy

Great info that explained it perfectly...thank you for all you do.

Comments Closed.

Using the iOS News App

Comments: 14 Responses to “Using the iOS News App”

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