news apps that will auto-download?

[laser310]

i have ordered an ipad for my wife who commutes on the train.

of course, we won't have it for a few weeks, but that's another thread...

anyway, i did get a 3g model, but it would be nice to save the 3g quota for things that need to be done in real time.

she leaves the house before 6am, and will not have time to manually download anything over wifi, before she leaves.

do any newspaper apps (new york times, wsj, etc..) have a feature where you can set the app to automatically download that day's early edition of the newspaper - say at 5:00am...?

if so, then she can just grab the thing as she runs out the door..., and read the news on the train.

reading about the NYT app, it seems that the new version _might_ do something like this, but it's not clear.

same with the financial times app - it might, but it's not clear.

 

[WesCole]

Not sure about the scheduling part, but you might give instapaper and offline pages a look. I haven't used them personally, but it looks like they might work.

 

[DylanG]

That would be nice, wouldn't it? But Apple doesn't allow that functionality. There are a number of apps dedicated to offline reading and many that will download and store news. But they all require the app to be launched by the user.

 

[laser310]

i looked at instapaper, and offline pages.

instapaper does not appear to do anything automatically.

offline pages does seem to have an automated feature in the "pro" version:

(PRO) Auto-update your favorite pages (great for blogs!)

but i doubt it will load the whole NY Times...


in what way has apple disallowed this technology?

 

[DylanG]

Apple is restrictive about what apps can do when not in the foreground. There is a small set of approved activities for multitasking. Waking up to retrieve network data isn't one of them. The idea is that you can feel safe that apps you install aren't using battery, network bandwidth, or generally doing things you are unaware of when not visible. I'm not arguing for this level of restriction but that's why it exists.