Updated for Version 1.7
and Lite Version 1.5
http://politicoTracker.com/guide

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If you are viewing this guide from within the app, you can rotate the screen 90 deg for a wider view. You can also double-tap and pinch the page to zoom in and out.

General Purpose and Methodology

politicoTracker is a news discovery tool, designed for the specific purpose of finding news articles about particular people. 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 politicoTracker, 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 people 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 politician (lite version does not have this capability).

The end result can be significant time savings for you. Instant, relevant news results about specific elected officials, 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 politicoTracker 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! politicoTracker 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.

Performing a Search

You perform a search on a particular politico by tapping on the person's name in either the main politico list, or in your favorites list.

By default, the main politico list sorts alphabetically by last name. You can sort the list by State instead, or go back to the Name sort, by tapping the appropriate button on the right of the filter text box.

You have several ways to navigate the list to find a particular elected official:

Scroll the list by flicking it up or down
Use the index on the right for faster scrolling
Sort by State first, then scan just the state the politician represents
Use the filter to quickly narrow down the list

There are 2 ways to use the list index:

Tap on a specific index item to scroll the list to that section immediately
Hold your finger on the index as you slide it up or down for "accelerated" scrolling

To use the filter: type text in the filter box to limit the list to those names that have that text in it. You can type any portion of the name, case insensitive, or the parenthesis and the state abbreviation. So if you type "john", you will get all politicos with a first name of "John", or with a last name of "Johnson", or anyone named "Dejohns", for example. If you type "(CA)" you get all the state representatives for California.

You can filter and sort at the same time. To get the sorting buttons back while filtering, tap the "Search" button at the bottom of the keyboard. You can then re-sort the list, and continue filtering if desired.

To get back the full list, you clear the filter by tapping the small X inside the filter box on the right, and tapping on "Cancel".

Search Date Ranges

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 person. For people who are in the news a lot, the date range will be fairly narrow. For lesser-known politicos, 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 local officials, 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.

Viewing Search Results

Once you perform a search, you will see a list of search results consisting of article headlines, publication date and time, and the name of the publisher. The articles are sorted by date order with the newest at the top. You can scroll the list to see older articles.

You can tap on the magnifier icon on the left of each article, or on the article headline, to see a short excerpt of the article. This excerpt is intended to give you a quick way to determine if the full article is worth viewing or not, since loading the full page from the internet may take some time.

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

If the article looks interesting, you can tap on the publisher's name at the top to see the full article as it appears on the publisher's web site. If the article is not worthy, tap the upper left button to return to the search results.

Once an article finishes loading, all instances of the politician's last name will be highlighted with a yellow background. This highlighting is based strictly on the text in the person's name, so there may occasionally be extraneous highlights that do not pertain to the politician. These were not used in the original search. The highlighting makes it easy to scan long articles to find the mention of interest. Note that in the case of multi-page articles, the politician may not be mentioned on the first page.

Saving Articles for Off-line Viewing

You have a number of options for how to save articles:

Save Article Excerpt
Email Article URL
Bookmark Article URL
Download Full Article
Open Article in Safari, to bookmark or email from there

These options are accessed by tapping the upper right icon when viewing an article. The options available will vary depending on what you are doing in the app at the time. For instance, you can only save the article excerpt from the excerpt view, and the other 4 options are only available from the full article view. Also, you can only delete an article from your favorites list if it is on that list.

When you choose "eMail URL", the in-app email sending screen will appear. The subject and body of the email will be pre-populated with the article headline, the name of the person you were doing the search on, and the URL of the article at it's original web site. All that's left to enter is the receiptients. You can type in email addresses or choose them from your contacts list. Your iPhone or iPod will remember who you send email to and offer to complete your typing. This is the email sending screen used in common throughout your device.

Bookmarking or Downloading articles will add them to your Articles Favorites list in the order in which they were saved. The difference is that when you bookmark an article URL, you must be connected to the intenet to see the article when you use that bookmark. If you download (save) the full article, it will be saved to your device and will be viewable without an internet connection.

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 politicoTracker 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.

An alternative to saving the article is to save just the excerpt without going to the full article view. This will be faster and take less storage space on your device. Then when you reload the excerpt from the favorites list, the publisher link will still be available to take you to the full article.

Grouping Results by Categories

Note: this section does not apply to politicoTracker Lite.

The real power of politicoTracker becomes evident once you start grouping search results by category. To do so, simply tap one of the category buttons at the top of the results list. Your search will then be re-run with the additional parameter of the category set.

Each category set consists of a number of "objects" (invisible to you) that fall within that category. For example, the "Government Agency" set consists of over 200 federal and state agencies. When you tap on this button, all the search results for your target politico are searched again for relevancy to any object within that set, all at once. The results are then returned to you grouped by those objects, with the highest number of cross-matches at the top.

When these results first load, the top group will be shown "open", while the rest of them will be "closed". You can open or close any group by tapping on the group row. When a group is open, it shows you the articles that were the best cross-match between the politico and the object of the group.

The total number of groups returned will vary with each search, but each group will at first contain a maximum of 5 articles. You can retrieve additional articles by tapping the "View More" button at the bottom of that group. Each tap will bring in 5 more articles.

Because of the way these cross-matching searches are performed, in rare occasions some news articles may be found when grouped by a category, when none were found doing a non-grouped search. It's worth a try, and you'll see a message concerning this when it applies.

Viewing and saving grouped articles works just like if they were ungrouped (see above).

Managing Favorites

Besides saving articles, you may also keep a list of "Favorite" politicos, to make it easier to perform searches on them in the future. You do so by tapping the plus (+) icon at the top right of the news results list. When a politico is added to your favorites list, the text <Favorite> will appear next to the person's name at the top, and the plus (+) icon will turn into the Delete (trash) icon, so you can remove that person from your list.

You access the favorites list page by tapping the multiple-head-and-article icon at the top left of the main politico list page.

You can remove politicos and articles directly from the favorites list by tapping the Edit button at the top right of that page. Then, tap the red circle next to an item you want to remove, and confirm the deletion by tapping the Delete button. Cancel a deletion by tapping anywhere else on the screen. Click the Done button at the top right when you are - well - done editing the page.

Alternatively, you can delete items from either list by swiping your finger across the row in either direction, and confirming with the Delete button. Cancel the removal by tapping anywhere else on the screen.

Miscellaneous

You can access the app info page to view this Users Guide or the Privacy Policy (or just to gaze upon the excellent artwork) at any time by tapping the small <i> icon at the top right of the main politico list page. The info page also has a button to visit the politicoTracker web site using Safari.

When viewing one of the support pages, you can rotate your device to get a wider view of the text. You'll need to rotate back to get the dismissal icon.

Thank You !!

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

http://politicoTracker.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!!