govTracker for iPad
User's Guide Updated for Version 2.0

Quick Start

➱Tap to go to that section
  1. Switch Lists
  2. Filter List
  3. Add/remove to favorites
  4. Perform search
  5. Article excerpt
  6. View full article
  7. Open/close group
  8. Download remaining items
  9. Navigate Grouped Results boxes
  10. Bring box to front
  11. Groups Manager

General Purpose and Methodology

govTracker is a news discovery tool, designed to find news articles about specific governmental entities. This is unlike almost all other news applications. General or even topic-specific news apps may display the latest news in a given category, but they typically make a tradeoff between breadth of sources vs narrowness of results. Usually the larger the number of sources, the larger the amount of off-topic results you need to wade through (think Google's umpteen pages of results for most searches). And as soon as a human is involved in the curation of results, the number of sources must necessarily decrease dramatically (and possibly bias the result set).

The technology behind govTracker, however, gives you the best of both worlds - news searches against a global set of source publications with highly targeted and relevant results. This is achieved by using humans (actually, information specialists) earlier in the search process, in pre-defining how searches are to be conducted for each of the entities in this app, and then allowing technology to execute those searches against the biggest possible set of inputs. Going one step further, using a wealth of other pre-defined search "objects" grouped into logical "sets", it is possible to instantly conduct a search for news about all objects in a set, and correlate that to a given entity.

The end result can be significant time savings for you. Instant, relevant news results about specific departments, commissions, and other organizations, grouped by a topic you choose. This is capability beyond most search engines, unfiltered by human biases or limitations. That's the "good".

The drawback is that because govTracker searches only for references to these pre-defined objects, this tool cannot be considered a general-purpose search product. In other words, do not expect this to work like your typical search engine - but again, that's a good thing! govTracker is also not a deep research tool, in that the results obtained do not include "old" news, and in that only publicly available, published news stories are searched against.

Switch lists

➱
  1. Tap "News Discovery" to open list drawer
  2. Choose list category

Filter lists

➱
  1. Type any portion of the name or acronym
  2. View count of matching items
  3. See the list filtered with each keystroke
  4. Clear the text to see the full list
  5. Canceling gives you the list with the last filter (if any)

Add/Remove to/from Favorites

➱

Add to Favorites

  1. Select organization to view their news
  2. Verify correct organization is currently selected
  3. Tap + icon to add to your favorites list
Once added as a favorite, the + icon turns into a "trash can" icon.

Tap the trash can to remove from your favorites list.

You can also edit the favorites list directly (see below).

Access Favorites

  1. Tap Favs button to open Favorites list
  2. Tap any organization or saved article headline to go directly to that item
  3. Tap the Edit button to remove items from your favorites list

Perform News Discovery

➱
  1. Tap organization you need to know about
  2. First results box contains all the latest news, unfiltered and ungrouped
  3. Other boxes contain that organization's news, grouped by topic
  4. Auto-loaded groups are behind the first box, followed by manually-loaded
  5. Use the Groups Manager (last box) to set group order and auto-load (see group manager section below)
The date range of each search is dynamic, meaning it will change from one search to the next depending on the overall number of results for that organization. For those that are in the news a lot, the date range will be fairly narrow. For lesser-known offices, the date range will be automatically expanded in an attempt to find some news about them.

Although there is a maximum number of stories that will be retrieved, there is no minimum. It is not uncommon to see only a few articles found for certain smaller agencies, for example. And although there is no set maximum date range for any search, in general articles older than 90 days will not be found.

View article excerpt

➱
  1. Tap to view excerpt
  2. Tap to view full article
  3. Tap and slide to dismiss this excerpt
Normally the full text of the article is not available in the excerpt due to copyright restrictions. However, some articles (mostly blog posts) are restriction-free, and the entirety of the text will appear here.

View full article

➱

You-Pick In-Article Highlighting

  1. Toggle highlight control visibility
  2. Toggle highlight on that term
The last name is always auto-highlighted. This highlighting is strictly text-based, so there may occasionally be extraneous highlights that do not pertain to the politician. These were not used in the original search.

In the case of multi-page articles, the politician may not be mentioned on the first page.

Article Saving and Export

  1. Create email with article short link
  2. Save text of article
  3. Leave app & open article in Safari
  4. Send to your Instapaper account (login required)
  5. If already saved to device, remove from favorites

Grouped News Handling

➱
  1. Toggle section open/close
  2. Tap to download remaining items (if any)
Sections are sorted by number of items.

Within each section, articles are sorted by date.

At initial load, a max of 5 articles per section are downloaded.
If there are more than 5 news articles in a section, the Download icon will appear to let you get the rest.

If there are more than 100 articles in a section, the date range will be narrowed to avoid search time-outs.

Navigate Grouped Results boxes

➱

Using Box Buttons

  1. Tap and release to bring a specific box to the front
  2. Tap & slide selects boxes
  3. Currently selected box
  4. Slide off to cancel
Slide your thumb up and down the buttons to select boxes.

The selected box will slide to the right, and its name will glow.

Lift your thumb when a box is selected to bring it to the front.

Direct Box Tap

  1. Where space allows, tap the top of a box to bring it forward

Groups Manager

➱

Reorder Groups

  1. Slide control up/down to change group order
  2. These groups will load each you perform a search
  3. These groups require you to manually load them
Limit the number of auto-loaded groups to conserve bandwidth and speed loading times.

Place your most-used groups in auto-load to save time.

Add Groups

  1. Tap to bring Group Buying Module forward (next image)
  1. Choose how many groups you want to add to open Groups Chooser (next image)
  1. Navigate hierarchical list to choose groups to add
  2. Select this group
  3. Additional instructions and hints
  4. Tap to initiate purchase
The app must be able to communicate with the Apple App Store to purchase groups.

You can change your mind about how many groups to buy at a time. The "Buy" button is only active when the number of groups you have selected to purchase equals the number of groups in your chosen purchase.

IMPORTANT: Once purchased, your selected groups become a part of the app, and cannot be changed. Please ensure you select the Grouping Topic that is of interest to you.

ALSO: It is strongly recommended you back up this app with iTunes after completing a purchase. If you delete this app from your device, your purchases will be lost, unless you have a backup.

Saving Articles for Off-line Viewing

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Note that a downloaded "full article" includes only the full text of the story, and not external formatting files, images, or other objects on the page, to cut down on data transfer and the amount of space each article takes on your device. If you later view the saved article while connected to the internet, those objects will be reloaded. If you are not connected, you can still read the text, but if the page relied on external formatting it may not look right. This will vary depending on how the page was constructed by the publisher. Also, in the case of multiple-page articles, only the page currently loaded in the app will be saved.

In rare cases, a downloaded article may not re-load at all due to missing objects from the page. If this happens, tap the Options icon at the top right, and open the article in the Safari web browser.

Also, please be aware that news articles are viewed at the original publisher's web site, and the nature of web sites is that they can change over time. So, depending on the web site's management, some article pages may have changed since the article was first processed and added to the govtracker news results. In extreme cases that page may not contain the same article at all anymore. In these situations, you may be able to find the article through that web site's search or archive functions.

Miscellaneous

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The info page buttons are fairly straightforward. Both the "Contact Us" and "Tell a Friend" buttons will invoke the in-app emailer. In the first button, our email address and subject are preloaded. Just tell us what's on your mind. With the second, the email subject and body are pre-populated, just add your friend's email address and send.

The "Review" button will take you straight to the "Leave a Review" page for this app in the App Store. Feel free to share your experiences, good or bad.

Thank You !!

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We thank you for your interest in or purchase of govTracker, and we welcome your feedback. There is a contact form on the web site at

http://gov-tracker.com/contact

where you can report an issue, request a new feature, or just wish us a nice day!

Don't forget to submit a review in the App Store!!

©Copyright 2011 pTracker, LLC