Published by Steve Litchfield at 8:46 UTC, January 27th 2017

Over a year ago, the Daily Mail Online got its first UWP app incarnation, which I wrote up here . Since then the developer (who I know) has been very hard at work and we now have a complete redesign, perhaps the most fluid news reading experience I've yet seen on the platform. Below are some insights from the developer and screenshots/links.

Let's start with the developer (Invoke IT) and his notes on this new v2(.0.5.0):

I mentioned that the design is different – it follows the curated style on the website closely. Not only that I have followed a new style myself – I created this app as an SPA (Single Page Application). With WinRT API page caching is disabled by default and maintaining scroll positions etc is PITA. In past I have seen ListView behaving oddly when page caching is turned on. To get away from this, I created this app as an SPA. No forward backward navigation – its more like show / hide correct content. It's a big experiment on my side.

There's definitely a feeling that you're interacting with a fluid, almost 'alive' entity when reading through v2.x - and less of a feeling that you're browsing through a web page via a wrapper.

With a SPA, performance will depend on the device being used and its free RAM, of course - for the tech heads, this figure is broken out in one of the Settings screens. I was using Daily Mail Online on a Lumia 950 XL (on Redstone 2) and everything was pretty fluid, with just the right balance of textual layout and images getting 'filled in' as I scrolled.

Here's the new version of the app in action:

The styling and content are very definitely 'Daily Mail' - what's interesting here is how responsive and fluid the layout is, adapting to screen resolutions, orientation, and so on. It's like a window into an enormous semi-graphical broadsheet!

Here's the app in landscape mode on the phone - Continuum displays work too, only with more content.

Note the free RAM breakout in Settings - perhaps useful for the developer, but also for geeks like you and I?(!) The facility to auto-sync content in the background is handy for when you want to be able to have everything available immediately when you start reading, and thankfully you can set all the bandwidth-busting images to only download in this manner over Wi-fi.

You can grab Daily Mail Online for free here in the Store if you have a phone running Windows 10 Mobile.