There are a few things that may not be blatantly obvious about @U2′s iPhone app, so I’d like to use this post to show you how it works and hopefully answer any questions you may have had. I’ll include a few screenshots to illustrate what I’m talking about.
After you download the app and install it, it will open up to the “Home” tab — it looks like this:
“Home” is one of five tabs along the bottom, and this tab is showing you the same content on our home page — www.atu2.com. It’s our Bits & Bytes content. The “Originals” tab will include all of our original articles, columns, essays, interviews, etc. — like OTR, Question of the Month, U2 Lists, and things like Tassoula’s recent interview with Robert Hilburn. The “Blog” tab shows all of our blog posts (what you’re reading now), and the “Forum” tab shows a feed of recent posts in the @U2 Forum. On each of these screens, you can click the icon in the upper right to refresh the screen and check if there’s anything new.
When you click on an article from the Home or Originals tab, you’ll see a screen like this:
This will show a portion of the full article (unless it’s a really short article, which might show in full). If you click the arrow in the upper right, the app will give you three choices: View in Browser, Share on Twitter, Send in Email. Click “View in Browser” to read the full article, or use the other two options to share the article with friends. The “Blog” tab will include the full text of our blog posts.
The left and right arrows in the upper middle of all these tabs lets you go from one article to the next without having to go back to the main tab screen.
The “More” tab is where you’ll find access to our Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts.
And clicking any of those will lead you to our messages, videos, or photos on each site. The YouTube section, for example, looks like this:
From there you can click to watch any of the videos we’ve uploaded.
So that’s a quick guide to what all the tabs and buttons do. We sure hope you iPhone and iPod Touch users like the app and will use it to keep up with all the latest U2 news. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
Last 4 posts by Matt McGee
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- Bono Snacks with Bill Gates at Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting - May 9th, 2012
- (PHOTO) When U2 Only Grossed $2,500 Per Show - February 20th, 2012
- VIDEO: Here It Is ... All 15 Minutes of Bono Singing in Timbuktu - February 1st, 2012
Great stuff. The only area that is a bit useless, is the forum. Currently I’m seeing 4 posts – all on one topic of people replying to each other.
Otherwise well done to all involved. I will definitely use it often.
Thx Groover. Agreed and understood — the forum tab will be of limited value to non-forum users, and perhaps limited value even to some who are. But that’s okay.
Nice…now get started on a version for Android!
If there are companies that will make an Android app relatively cheaply (like AppMakr.com does for iPhone), we’ll gladly do it.
I’m not able to download this on my first-gen touch because a microphone is required?
Can you please fix this?
I suppose a mic is required to hear the YouTube clips?? Don’t know why else it would be.
In any case, Miro – sorry, but we can’t make any updates to the app without incurring substantial costs. Since we’re offering it for free, we don’t have a way to pay for things like that.
I understand…and checking the site daily on my Macbook is no trouble at all.
Thanks for the response!
Why would we need a mic to hear the YouTube clips? shld be a speaker right?
The microphone thing is some weird policy in AppMakr. They say on their site that it is out of their control, but I have plenty of blog readers on my 1st generation iPod touch.
I don’t think it’s worth extra cost to you; doesn’t sound like they would fix it anyway, and that’s wrong. Maybe you could put a bug in their ear, tell them that *next* time you build an app with them it will require 1st gen ipod touch compatibility, since there really is no technical reason they can’t. Or at least man-up to the real reason they can’t. I don’t know, but as a software dev, I’d guess they can’t handle the substantial costs of supporting an old device.