App Review: K-News app for Android brings Mauritian news to your fingertips.

If you’re out there looking for a local news aggregator, there is an excellent app in the Google Play Store developed by a local developer. K-news has it all in place for you. When you open the app, it provides content from popular newspapers of the country. Currently, it’s showing news articles from L’Express and Defi Media news groups. The lazy among us will appreciate that they won’t have to go out hunting for news source to add to the app and you don’t need to sign in with any of your social network accounts to pull content from the above-mentioned news source. That’s a great plus for those who value their privacy.

Interface

When you open K-News, you see a card-view layout and you swipe up and down to scroll. Swiping down from the top will refresh the news feed and pull new contents if available. You can also tap the Refresh button at the top next to the Search icon. The latter will bring up a Search screen and bar. Type in a word or phrase you’d like to search and the app will display all articles related to your search. Tap the X in the Search field to clear it and do another search. After you’re done, tap the back button on your phone to return to the app main screen.

The developer published an update today that brings some nice changes to the UI. I’m posting some pictures below that shows the old and new UI. The cards now show the news category as well and a reader counter that shows the number of times an article was read. By default, the app shows the news making the headlines first. And there is an option in the menu to show the most read ones. There’s also a Video option that pulls video content from L’Express, Defi Media and IoN Video. These filters can be found under the hamburger menu – the three horizontal bars – in the upper left corner of the app. You can also swipe from left of your screen to access them.

Old UI                                       New UI

Articles

Each card in the newsfeed shows the news tile and the beginning of the article. Tap the card to display the full article. The full news page has a picture at the top and the title right underneath it. I’ve noticed that those loads very quickly, but the article took longer to load. The text is left aligned which, in my opinion, makes for easy reading and the font size makes the text easy to read.

Each article has the sharing icon in the upper right to share to social networks or in emails. If you find a news of interest but you don’t have time to read it, you can choose to read later provided you have apps like Pocket installed on your device.

Conclusion

K-News is currently in beta, meaning the developer is still working on it and may have some bugs. But it is publicly available for download without the need to sign up and despite being a beta, it is very stable. I haven’t experienced any crashes. Sure, there are a lot of features that the developer can choose to add, like giving users the ability to choose the category they want to see more or support for notifications. But again, this is work in progress and I’m sure he will add more features. As of now, K-News is the best local news aggregator you will find in Google Play Store.

Google adds 54 new country-based holiday to the Calendar app.

I started an app project over year ago on Windows Phone, which was a local holiday app which is still available today in the Windows Store. The idea came because I was frustrated that builtin calendars on my phones did not have country's holidays listed or in the case this feature was there, Mauritius was not in the list of supported countries. So I made the app to save holidays to my Outlook.com calendar which then replicated to all my devices whether they be Windows Phone, Android and iOS. Today, Google is going the same way by adding 54 new country-based holiday to the Google Calendar app, bringing the total of holiday calendars to 143, including Mauritius. This new feature is already available for download in Google Play store.

Follow the steps to add or change National holidays:

1. Open the Google Calendar app
2. In the top left, touch the Menu icon > Settings > Holidays.
3. Touch the name of the current country.
4. Touch a new country to add it, or touch the currently selected country to remove it.

Source: Google