The Sky News app for iPad represents a bold step for Sky, who should be praised for merely adapting their popular iPhone app for a bigger screen. It's fabulous to look at, slick to use and intuitive to boot, but questions remain about the content it is offering.
Sky has pumped huge investment into its apps, and the broadcast giant currently offers up some of the most impressive offerings in the Apple App Store.
And the Sky News app for iPhone will, for a while at least, represent one of the crown jewels of Sky's efforts in applications.
From the very first page it is clear that this is a big step in terms of the user interface. The Home screen offers a series of pictures of differing sizes, with the main story immediately being pushed to the forefront and the other stories spreading down the page.
These pictures represent the main stories of the day, and clicking on each on brings up what can probably be termed a hub page for that story. We'll look at those pages in a minute.
Also on offer on the home page is a 'live' option that streams Sky News to your iPad as it happens. We were trying out the app over Wi-Fi and the quality was great.
To the top left of the screen is an option to switch from the top stories view to a timeline view – which (as the name suggests) allows you to chronologically list the stories rather than look at the more editorialised view.
It does this by placing the latest story to the right and you can scroll back left across the timeline. It sounds obvious and it is – intuitive, nicely designed and well thought through.
