HitByWords - The News Explorer at Mac App Store analyse

Among a sea of news app in App Store, this is actually a special one. The Google Trends search is definitely fun to play and the integration of map to show the interests geographically is pretty awesome too. However, all these fun things doesnt mean it is a useful app. It has potential to grow but you cannot really use it to accomplish something. Again, very interesting app. I hope more features can be added over time.

2.0 is definitely a big improvement compared with the past versions. Good for the developer to take my advice to integrate a map since for most of people they only know the locations of big cities. A map is helpful to know where the locations of other places.

Undoubtedly this is the most non-mainstream news app I ever used. Rather than providing something like top 10 trending news for you, this app lets you dig what could be trending by yourself. Very cool feature! I will still keep Goole News as my first news app while HitByWords would be my auxiliary news tool.

While the UI of this app is not so fancy, what it can provide is pretty insightful. Just read the news whose topic is about the slump in oil prices and found people who lives in Fort McMurray, CA have high interest in "oil price." Out of curiosity, I did a little bit research (aka Google) and found the decline in oil prices has made the local companies look for ways to reduce their operating cost, which means workers are getting the axe. Fort McMurray was rising and is falling due to the oil industrial, and no wonder the local people are very sensitive to oil price. I have to say this is a pretty amazing experience. Totally recommend this app and hope there will be more features.

This app provides a pretty innovative way to explore a news. I just browsed a news about Apple shares and then tried to search Tim Cook by Google Trends. It happened people in Italy are very interested in Tim Cook in the past 24 hours for a reason. After some digging, it turned out Cook flight to Italy as well as met Pope in Vatican recently and I was unaware that until now. Very cool! However, if this app wants to claim it is a mobile news explorer, which is ambitious, there is still a huge room for improvement especially for UI/UX. The idea of this app is fascinating but the implementation is kind of weak. Overall, good app and I definitely very excited for what is ahead.

I really like this app, it provides update-to-date information in a neat way, but the articles with same topic should be grouped together like Google News does and the word cloud should be helpful for this purpose. Besides, though the Google Trends helps to expose the geographical interest, the app should provide a quick tutorial to guide users to know how to use it. Finally, it would be better if we can use the feature of Google Trends without a Google account. But it seems impossible?