One of my favorite iPhone applications is BNO News — a lightweight app that lets you receive messages from the BNO newswire. The service, which is best known for its extremely popular Twitter account, offers very timely, short snippets of news throughout the day, often before mainstream media catches wind of it. The iPhone app lets you receieve these messages as soon as they happen using push notifications. It’s great (I always feel like I know what’s going on before everyone else), but the app had one major flaw: BNO News pushed an alert for every story it deemed important.
That means that I’ve gotten urgent updates on stories that I really don’t care about, like the French lottery having a large jackpot. This isn’t to say that the stories weren’t newsworthy — I just didn’t need my iPhone ringing every time one of them popped up. Fortunately that ends today: BitMethod, the development house that built the BNO News app, has released a new version that brings with it some key new features, including the ability to filter the stories you receive. You can download the updated version here.
The new application is still quite straightforward. Upon opening it you’ll see a list of the most recent BNO News stories. Click the ‘Options’ button and you’ll be able to subscribe to updates from over a dozen categories, including Politics, Tech/Science, Disasters, Health, and more. If there are only a few specific topics that you’re interested in, you can specify a list of keywords, and get alerted any time one of those appears in an update. From then on you’ll only receive updates from those categories, along with the news that BNO News considers very important.
Another addition to the BNO application is a subscription pricing plan (the old application’s page informed users that this change was coming). If you want access to the full filtering options BNO News will cost 99 cents per month, with one month included as part of the application’s initial $1.99 purchase price.
Too bad BNO is wrong half the time it tweets and never gives sources or links.
Haters! Are everywhere =)
most major news articles have been spot on. the lower ones maybe 3/4 of the time. but, i rather know something than not know. i can google new it if need be.
BNO News push app is a waste of money. You can simply tell Twitter to push the updates to your phone for free. Same thing. Yeah it gives you all the updates but for a news junkie that’s what you want…..
Sorry, @Anonymus, that is nonsense. Despite the fact that I am a newsjunkie, I don’t want my iPhone to ring every time @BreakingNews twitters a news story or an update to a news story – they do both very, very frequently which is a good thing for Twitter, but would be a bad thing for my iPhone.
So, no Sir, this app is by far NOT the same as having the @BreakingNews twitter stream pushed to your iPhone by let’s say Boxcar.
I downloaded it on day one and it’s one of my favorite apps.
I like it, but I’m undecided about the subscription service attached to it. We’ll see in a month.
Does the subscription buy the push notifications alert..or is the subscription only for the filtering options?
Receiving and filtering the lower priority notifications.
Get it at http://appsto.re/bnonews
I have had this app for many months and during the big Earthquake I received nearly 400 Alerts!!!!
This app is cool but needs Micro-Adjustment features.
I want to say no more than 1 alert on a subject, category, etc. per X-Hours. Maybe in increments of 3 hrs or something where I can say for Earthquakes I dont need Alerts more than 1 per 12 hrs.
Otherwise if you want to go crazy do NOT buy this app.
However if you dont want alerts and just a news app which you read on a manual basis then it could be pretty good.
BTW- We charge $35 per hour to fix your app if you need
This update addresses most of the concerns you laid out. You should give this new version a spin and see if you like it better. Thanks for your comments!
Allow me to interrupt everyones self pimping to say that’s pretty cool. Nice work.
Does that news also come with RSS feeds?
I first started following BNO on Twitter and got frustrated with all the news filling up my feed. The first version of the app was a great solution to thi problem and, other than the subscription pricing, the new set of features will definitely keep this app at the forefront of news on the iPhone. Well done and great work.
Not a bad application. Reviews are not bad either http://www.uque...4536983#reviews
i love this app too but since updating to the newest version i have received zero push alerts. all catergories are marked as “on” and subscription is current.
Am proud of BitMethod! and the development team who I happen to know for a while now.
Love the App BNO News app my self.
Great Job guy’s!!!! Go DSM Go!
Great app for getting reviews fast.
Rally great app. Great team behind it! BitMethod is amazing and will do many great things! It is amazing to see when hard working ppl get to be successful.