anyone having trouble with New Yorker app?

[jobojobo]

New Yorker APP

If APP quits halfway through the download, just view what you have and slide to click on a choice towards the end of the issue. The APP starts up again and finishes the download for the whole issue. Don't know why but it always works for me.

 

[Mputzel]

App hasn't crashed on me the last few times. However, It's really annoying that every time I had to delete the app and redownload it, I lost all the multimegabite files of New Yorkers I already had downloaded. I hate waiting for ten minutes to download a whole issue before I can read Talk of the Town or the Table of Contents. Even when it works as it's supposed to, this app seems stuck in old thinking. It's also interesting that the magazine has now found a way to display online the black-on-black 9/11 cover that ten years later is still one of the most remarkable pieces of cover art ever.

 

[Fenners]

I'm not having a problem reading the app, because I can't get it to finish downloading! My connection is not that fast, but nonetheless everytime the download pauses, and unpauses, it starts over? What gives?

I bet this is also a May 17th thing, and I hope they take care of this quick.

I cannot get it to finish downloading an edition either; total pain just waiting before you can read.. New Yorker should take a leaf out of the Guardian newspaper App in the UK. One tap to enter the issue and then it builds the paper as you read. Will be cancelling my subscription to NY if this does not improve.

 

[jsh1120]

I cannot get it to finish downloading an edition either; total pain just waiting before you can read.. New Yorker should take a leaf out of the Guardian newspaper App in the UK. One tap to enter the issue and then it builds the paper as you read. Will be cancelling my subscription to NY if this does not improve.

I have both the Guardian and the New Yorker. They function identically. Each allows me to "enter the issue" before it has completed downloading. Perhaps your internet connection is much slower than mine, but I find that after about 10 seconds of downloading (when about 40mg or 200mg is downloaded) I can access the magazine.

 

[Fenners]

I have both the Guardian and the New Yorker. They function identically. Each allows me to "enter the issue" before it has completed downloading. Perhaps your internet connection is much slower than mine, but I find that after about 10 seconds of downloading (when about 40mg or 200mg is downloaded) I can access the magazine.

Thanks. Now makes sense, my Guardian App auto downloads an issue. On my NY app that is not the case; is there a way to change this as I'm downloading in the main over 3G but saying that even at home (wifi) it still seems to need full downloading before I can view. Also a lot of issues get so far and then flag a message saying there has been an error. Frustrating!

 

[jsh1120]

Thanks. Now makes sense, my Guardian App auto downloads an issue. On my NY app that is not the case; is there a way to change this as I'm downloading in the main over 3G but saying that even at home (wifi) it still seems to need full downloading before I can view. Also a lot of issues get so far and then flag a message saying there has been an error. Frustrating!

I'm suspecting that you haven't updated your os to iOS 5.0.X. If you do, you'll find that your New Yorker app will be abducted by the Newsstand folder. (You have no choice in that. Thanks, Apple.) It's an ugly app but it includes the automatic download feature. (At least it appears to for at least some issues.) In fact, I think it downloads automatically whether I ask for it to do so, or not.

Beyond that, I suspect you may be running into problems with the server or with your wifi or 3G connection when you're downloading. I find, for example, that downloads are typically quite speedy over my very fast (20 mb/p/s) cable modem/wifi network combination. But from time to time the downloads slow to a crawl and even throw an error. Interestingly, though, I sometimes get an error and then the download resumes and is unaffected. From all this I've concluded that the problems are either server or network based. If your internet access is considerably slower, I suspect it might not recover from a time out.

 

[Heaviside]

I have similar problems with my New Yorker, but also one I han't seen mentioned.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't the download supposed to continue if you switch to another app and leave the first one suspended in memory? Doesn't work on the New Yorker for me, though it does for email downloads.

 

[jsh1120]

I have similar problems with my New Yorker, but also one I han't seen mentioned.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't the download supposed to continue if you switch to another app and leave the first one suspended in memory? Doesn't work on the New Yorker for me, though it does for email downloads.

Sorry, buddy. The New Yorker app isn't "privileged" by the Apple gods. Email and music, yes. Publications, no.

 

[thewitt]

Sorry, buddy. The New Yorker app isn't "privileged" by the Apple gods. Email and music, yes. Publications, no.

The New Yorker App simply has not been coded to continue background download processing after its been switched out. There is no such "privilege" state required. Just make the correct calls and your background task will not be stopped. Apple even includes example code in the Programming Guide on how to do this.

No secret handshake required.

 

[jsh1120]

The New Yorker App simply has not been coded to continue background download processing after its been switched out. There is no such "privilege" state required. Just make the correct calls and your background task will not be stopped. Apple even includes example code in the Programming Guide on how to do this.

No secret handshake required.

Thanks for the correction, thewitt. Find it odd, though, that given the sophistication of the iPad New Yorker app on the iPad that they would have missed this rather important feature. In fact, I haven't run across any publication that continues to download when the app is closed. Can you point to one?

 

[thewitt]

We have two apps that download in the background once suspended, however they are enterprise apps and not in the store.

Complain to your subscription provider. There are only a few actual subscription apps, written by a very few companies on contract. These guys all need to update for Newsstand support as well as background processing.

 

[jsh1120]

We have two apps that download in the background once suspended, however they are enterprise apps and not in the store.

Complain to your subscription provider. There are only a few actual subscription apps, written by a very few companies on contract. These guys all need to update for Newsstand support as well as background processing.

As noted above, I don't really have much of a problem with this issue so I have no reason to complain. But it does strike me as odd that Apple struck a deal with the entire set of Conde Nast publications (at least 15 separate publications) and the flagship publication of the Conde Nast group would miss this feature. That would suggest that the rest of the CN publications which make up the lion's share of the Newsstand have a similar issue. Curious at best.

 

[thewitt]

If you have ever worked for a large corporation, it should not strike you as that strange to note they may have deficiencies in the completeness of their projects.... They are just people like you and me...

They also did not develop their own subscription apps in house. They were contracted - along with updates and maintenance. They are using a different contractor for maintenance than they used for the initial development.

 

[jsh1120]

Did a bit more research on the download issue and found that the problem is widespread. In fact, it appears that only The Guardian (and perhaps the NYTimes) don't suffer from the halted download problem because, presumably, they manage to support the unattended background downloads consistently. Virtually all of the Conde Nast publications (e.g. New Yorker, SI, Vogue, Wired, etc.) have the same problem.

From what I can tell, the problem comes about when the unattended background delivery feature fails. This process only works when an iPad is on wifi so if an iPad is wifi only and not connected or is on a 3G network rather than wifi, the automatic background download won't, of course, occur. In addition, it appears that even if these conditions are passed, the automated background download may fail due to network contention or server overload. (A task running in background has 10 minutes to finish its task. If it doesn't complete in that time, it fails completely.)

The result is that the Newsstand icon for a publication may be updated (indicating a new issue has been delivered) even if the download of content fails. In that case, it's up to the user to initiate the download and if the user leaves the app in this situation the "background completion" feature is disabled (or doesn't exist.) The download stops and must be restarted from the beginning.

I suspect that the engineers who coded the apps for the various publications that are failing thought they were doing what they needed to do to support background downloads. (That, after all, was the main objective of the Newsstand subsystem.) The problem is what I suspect is a failure to account for failed downloads when the unattended background process fails. I also suspect that Apple is aware of the problem and may update Newsstand to avoid it. By the same token, however, I suspect that it will require an OS update to fix it since Newsstand is not an "app," but a feature of iOS 5.

The url below (especially the comments section) is probably the best documentation of the problem.

What’s the Point of Newsstand Automatic Background Downloads?

 

[Mputzel]

Thanks to thewitt and jsh1120 I now get why I'm not getting what I thought I would get. The New Yorker, because it's such a big file, seems to take forever to download when I have to sit there and watch it, but switching away to do anything else stops the process. It's one of the most frustrating glitches I've encountered with the iPad 2. The explanations of why it doesn't work in the forced Newstand environment clarify why I sometimes find a new New Yorker already downloaded but often don't (I have wi-fi only.). There may be a technical reason why Apple set up the Newstand, but its determination to force publications into it or bar them from it means I have two "newstands" on my iPad: one for the publications I've selected and put in a folder called "News" and the other for apps like the New Yorker and NYTimes that Apple pushed into its own Newstand. The Apple Store may have the clout to do stuff like this right now, but with luck, increased competition will break its grip on the market. Meanwhile, it would be nice if the developers fixed the background downloading issue to reduce the time I and others have to sit there stewing about it.