UPDATE
3/19/25
Changes to the Times Contrarian
While we continue to promote the work of independent journalists by posting their work in our opinion sections, Viewpoint, Democracy and American Voices, we are sensitive to those that come to NYA for the music and prefer to avoid the political news. As a result, we’ve divided the Times-Contrarian into two sections, Music News and World News. Just select your area of interest by clicking on the appropriate button at the top of the newspaper.
2/7/25
For the past several weeks we’ve been tackling a problem that has likely caused inconvenience for many of you, the slowness of our website when opening, and the navigation inside the Times-Contrarian newspaper.
NYA became susceptible to loading issues and delays because we’ve been adding so much new content over time while keeping all of the older content readily available.
We reached a point where we needed to re-architect how, when, and what we loaded in the background. Ideally you want to load only what you will be viewing just before you decide to view it, rather than loading everything all at once.
The Times-Contrarian, in particular, uses a huge number of graphic images to create the look and feel of the paper, ten to twenty times more per page than, say, a page from the N.Y. Times.
It reached a point where it became difficult to navigate between pages without needing to wait for pages to change and photos to load, making it frustrating to use.
We’ve been working with our software development company, Hello Iconic, for a number of weeks on rebuilding the back end, and finally have reached a point where the site is much improved and your experience should be much better. Thanks for your patience.
NYA
(Click heading to read previous updates.)
November 11, 2024
New Getting Started help
We’ve added a new area to NYA especially for new members. It’s a series of explanations to the various parts of NYA. It’s accessed from the Getting Started item found on the website’s menu. Or just click here!
October 18, 2024
Hi y’all, this is a little notice for the NYA nerds and I beg you to skip past it if that’s not how you self-identify.
As some of y’all noticed, a good number of tracks on NYA Vol III were published to the site without infocards — that has now been changed. Let me explain why that happened, and foreshadow some changes to the site mechanics that we’ve been working on behind the scenes.
Which songs get infocards and which don’t has been a relatively uncomplicated affair since the launch of NYA: songs Neil is on get infocards; song’s he’s not on don’t; the same recording released unchanged on multiple records gets one infocard; the same recording released with substantial (mix or edit) changes to the audio will get a new infocard for each different-sounding version. (When I say relatively uncomplicated I obviously mean relative to the baseline level of complicated we operate on here at NYA, which is to say: overly.)
This system has caused us some minor problems over the years. If a previously released recording is remastered (but not edited or remixed) for a new release then that remastered audio will simply replace the audio on the existing infocard; when listening to the album(s) that were associated with the previous master your smooth flow may be disrupted by audio that was mastered not for the album sequence you’re listening to but for a different newer release (e.g. the release last year of Chrome Dreams messed with the experience of listening to a few different albums that played host to the Chrome Dreams tracks after that album was shelved).
Chrome Dreams is actually the perfect example — it caused noticeable enough problems with enough other records that we broke our rule, and gave those remasters their own infocards. This caused a new problem: hearing the same recording multiple times in quick succession in chronological autoplay! Annoying! An annoyance we lived with for about a year, until we came face to face with a much bigger example of the same problem: every single previously released recording included in Vol III was remastered substantially enough to cause mastering flow problems when listening to their original release albums, but adding new infocards for every single track on Vol III would make chronological autoplay/browsing for the Vol III time period much more repetitive than we’d like.
We talked about this problem for many many many hours and, without the time to develop substantial backend changes to how NYA works, we decided on a stopgap solution that nobody much liked but that we all agreed was probably the best thing we could do: previously released recordings included in the Vol III set would not replace the existing audio on existing infocards, nor would the new audio get their own infocards. Instead, those tracks would be what we call “list only” — accessible only in their album lists, with no visible infocard anywhere on NYA.
Enough of you were (understandably) upset about that solution that we’ve decided to reverse it and publish those infocards. We’re also trying to figure out a solution that lets those infocards exist on the site without appearing in chronological autoplay/browsing which, if you’ve made it this far into this announcement I’m sure you understand is a complicated web development problem that may take some time to materialize and may never materialize — we have great developers but I’m not one of them and I don’t understand the technical work enough to know whether to be confident in any particular outcome. My attitude towards new NYA features is very similar in that way to the rusties attitude toward teased archival releases: I’ll believe it when I see it.
It’s a bizarre, unique, unwieldy website, a junker jetplane that we’ve been building in midair that we’re still trying to optimize into something airworthy that’s simultaneously true to Neil’s history and vision and straightforward and uncluttered and easy to navigate for the uninitiated user: an impossible goal that ideally we approach asymptotically forever without crippling development costs.
I thank you for bearing with us while we figure this specific bit of weirdness out so that y’all can get back to enjoying NYA and we can move on to our next (re) development project.
Love,
j
September 18, 2024
Development update
Android Auto is now working and you will find the app to be much more stable. Be sure you’ve downloaded the latest Version 1.31 (186) as shown in the About option in the drop down menu in the app.
September 16, 2024
Development update
– A new Android update improves its interaction with the Times-Contrarian. You’ll now be able to see the latest stories and navigate through the T-C on your Android phone.
– The digital download store has been improved to handle more simultaneous downloads and do a better jon converting files from wav to flac.
August 26, 2024
Development update
Good news! A new update 182(1.30.1) has been released in the Play Store and fixes the problems some of our Android users have been experiencing. Try it and let us know.
August 14, 2024
Development update
NYA is available on the web and as iOS and Android apps. The most challenging app for us has been Android. As we’ve previously noted, we’ve been putting in a lot of effort to improve its performance, particularly to eliminate random crashes. While we’ve made progress, we still have almost a dozen of you still experiencing problems. I know this well, because I am one of them. This week we’ve brought on additional Android app expertise to address these issues.
While not an excuse, I did want to provide some issues why the Android app has been more problematical than the iPhone app to develop. Android runs on a wide range of devices with different screen sizes, resolutions, hardware specifications, and performance levels. This diversity makes it challenging to ensure that an app works well on all devices.
Android users tend to be on different versions of the OS, which means we need to ensure compatibility across multiple versions. Unlike Apple, Google updates are handled by the phone manufacturers and they don’t have the same incentives to keep their older phones up to date.
Additionally, many manufacturers customize their phones with their own software that often leads to inconsistencies in how apps behave on different devices. Since Android devices range from budget to high-end, an app can sometimes fail on phones with less robust hardware.
When we develop and test our app, it’s not possible to test on all the variations of hardware and software, unlike iPhones with fewer models and more consistent specs.
With all that said, we are expecting to address our outstanding issues over the next 2-3 weeks. In the meantime if you experience issues and have not contacted us, we’d appreciate your submitting a note to our customer service describing your problem and providing the phone make and model and the software revision.
Thanks,
Phil Baker
(Click heading to read more.)
7/18/24
Bringing an improved Times-Contrarian to the app
We’ve just released an upgrade to our iOS app (1.26.0.409) that now provides a much more faithful reproduction of the Times-Contrarian on the website. We are still working with font sizes, so bear with us. We are doing the same for Android users once we address some new issues on some phones where the app crashes upon opening.
6/20/24
This month we are working to improve the Times-Contrarian experience on an app. This sixteen page newspaper was originally designed for use on a computer, but since more of you are accessing NYA from an app, we are want to make it easier for you to read and navigate the articles from your phone or tablet. When completed, the app will reimage the exact same files and database as the desktop. We expect to release within the first half of July.
5/5/24
IOS updated to fix a CarPlay loading issue
4/24/24
New Development Updates in progress
– Fixing album cover art in player to make consistent across all platforms
– Updating Map to include link to Tickets and Gift Cards
– Adding user name to the home screen when signed in
4/11/23
-A new iOS Version 1.25.3 fixes Search. The Home menu has been updated, and Gift Cards are now easier to buy and are now delivered within an hour.
– The problem with several tracks on the Zuma album not playing past :30 has been fixed. It was caused by a metadata issue.
3/15/24
Good news for Android users. Our latest Android App version 1.28 fixes most of the issues that many of you have experienced, especially the sudden crashes. Please update your app now and let us know how you like it.
2/28/24
During our recent presale many asked why they were not able to purchase tickets from their NYA phone app. We would love to be able to do that to make it more convenient, but both Apple and Google take 30% commissions for purchases made through our apps, so it’s just not practical. NYA is currently looking at another solution for allowing purchases from your phone that still complies with the Apple and Google requirements.
2/21/24
iOS sign in issue – We are working on a problem that prevents the ability of some users to access their paid account on their iOS Apple app. It began to appear around the time of the presale when we were deluged with traffic – the most ever in such a short period. Our software engineers are working on it as our number one priority.
Android – A major revision of Android that addresses a number issues, especially instability, will be available in the Google store early next week.
2/13/24
We’re making progress fixing our Android app that has been unstable for some of you. You should see an update in about a week, and we apologize for the problems you experienced.
We’re also fixing our Gift Subscription process, which has not always worked as intended. The fixes are done and now being tested. Once it’s working properly it will go back up on the site. We have reached out to those of you we thought might have experienced a problem getting the card delivered. If you had an issue and were not contacted, contact customer support via the submittal form on the site.
1/24/24
For those using the Apple app, we just released a new version 1.25 that fixes its search capabilities.
When Apple upgraded the operating system to version 17, the search function stopped working reliably. Thanks to some reports from you, our members, we were able to duplicate the issue and then have our developers began to work on a fix. It took quite a bit of effort, about eight weeks to identify the cause, redesign the app, restore the search functionality, and fully test.
It’s now available on the Apple App Store.