App race is on! Every other day, now, there is a possibility to have app that depicts uniqueness in itself. Just a while ago, an app has been launched by two students from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) named Pakistan News Cloud.
As the name suggests “Pakistan News cloud” is an app that will gather news about Pakistan on a single platform for you. This app aims to collect Pakistan related news from the internet and compiles them on the user’s Android phone, thus a best means to cater all and best for Pakistani news followers.
App is developed — under a support of IBA incubation centre — by Asadullah and Imran Leghari, currently studying at Institute of Business Administration.
Pakistan News Cloud is lightweight and simply accessible app that facilitates users to browse through Pakistan News, sports news, science and technology news along with business, entertainment and international news stuff.
Now news searchers could get rid off by wasting time on bulky user interface and several forms of signup at different sites.
Instant Features:
- Whole news stuff can be cumulated from several sources on single page
- Sharing of news with friends is thoroughly possible via Facebook, Twitter,Email, SMS and MMS.
- Friendly accessible tabs
- Simple and clean interface without bulks of Ads.
Download:
This app can be downloaded free from play store by clicking here.
Furthermore, according to developers’ team, they will keep on developing apps related to health, education, Islamic education, teachings of the Quran, the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and Namaz for Pakistani children and for those living abroad.
Getting back to “Pakistan News Cloud”, its simple, intelligent and time saving app and that’s for free to serve the masses. From these sorts of app developments, it can be predicted that we will soon be having bunch of striking apps developed locally.
Here are few screens taken from Pakistan News Cloud app:
Good Work
That’s a nice app by Pakistan..
Excellent idea. If any of the websites change their formatting slightly, this app gonna crash because the parser won’t work.
What these genuinses should have done is run a proper news aggregation service with subscription to share with the news sources and sold to clients.
What a lot of people criticising this idea (not just you, reinventing the wheel, but I have seen elsewhere) is they miss one crucial point: NO ONE ELSE DID THIS BEFORE.
Think about it. Android phones have been growing famous in the local market for several years now. Even cheap ones that cost Rs 8-20,000. And yet, this is the first time someone has built an application like this for local news sites.
Sure, it is fragile and will break. Sure, they should do a better job of using RSS/Atom feeds. But the fact is, they did SOMETHING. It’s a start. I am sure there is nothing preventing them from adding better and more stronger features. The mere fact that people are talking about their application is that it has some kernel of GOOD in it.
There is an app titled News & Weather with similar output formatting etc which can be downloaded from the playstore. It used to come preinstalled on many HTC phones specially earlier versions. The value add I see in this app is that the links open internally within the app.
News and Weather widget is with Android and I have had it on my phone (stock Android, not custom skin like HTC) since 2.3. However, I have found that it is often NOT very good at targeting Pakistan-only news. I often get links to Pakistan-related stories in other media (Indian, UK, Reuters, etc), or completely unrelated news stories.
@shahidsaleem:disqus Thanx for your support and encouragement. I am so glad to see thread about my app on this portal. I am the developer of this app. Indeed there is a lot to be done yet its just the beginning. I will improve the app in terms of stability, features and GUI as well. I m doing my exams I m student and I m doing all the development alone so I have got a lot to do in very short time.
People keep on saying that Innovation should be something like a research or get something patent. To be honest, I have one publication in journal of Technology and Research and guess what? Nobody cares about it. Research has no worth in Pakistan (except for those who are also researchers). My friends with more than 2 publications in high impact factor journals are jobless. However I m still carrying out my research in Grid computing in Mobile Ad-hoc networks as my M.S research work. Need your support and prayers.
As the app is up and running. Specially it made its journey to the play store, I guess the developer will learn and improve it. Meanwhile I agree that format based parsing would not be best thing to do, one format change and things fall back.
Also I have seen that Pakistani news sites don’t change their layout too frequently.
For getting all news at a place,its brilliant..!
Have they added the section IT & Telecom News section? Having done this, this will send the ProPakistani to Long Leave……….. Isn’t it?????
Suggestion: There must be “Donate” option and every pakistani should a peny or two to help improve this app…. do u ppl agree????
Excellent suggestion. In fact, you have hit upon an idea that is sorely needed in Pakistan: some way to tip application writers, or other content creators for their work. For example, there is a service called flattr for this sort of purpose. Someone should launch a Pakistan-only service similar to that, possibly using easypaisa, with a small transaction fee.
It will take over the market.