Cleaner subscribe, a new icon and easier Crickles on your phone

A few small improvements — and a quick how-to for your phone

A few small improvements have landed this week. None of them changes how Crickles works, but each makes it a little nicer to use.

A cleaner way to subscribe

The Subscribe box on the Home page has been rebuilt. It’s simpler now — just a single line to enter your email — and it stays on crickles.org rather than sending you off to a third-party page cluttered with adverts. When you sign up you’ll get a short confirmation email; all you need do is click the link in it. As before, this is completely separate from your Navigator sign-in, so anyone who’s “Crickles curious” can follow the news without needing an Intervals account or even a sports device.

If you already subscribed under the old system, you’ve been carried across automatically — there’s nothing you need to do. And if you prefer to read through an RSS reader, the feed is still at https://crickles.org/index.xml.

A Crickles icon

Crickles now has its own little icon — a C with a pulse trace — so you’ll see it in your browser tab, in your bookmarks, and, as below, on your phone’s Home Screen. A small thing, but it makes Crickles easier to pick out at a glance.

Adding Crickles to your phone’s Home Screen

If you use the Navigator on a phone, the quickest way in is a Home Screen shortcut that opens it in a single tap.

On an iPhone — using Safari (Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone don’t offer this):

1. Open the Navigator at https://crickles.org/app.
2. Tap the Share button — the square with an upward arrow — in the toolbar.
3. Scroll down, tap Add to Home Screen, then Add.

On Android — using Chrome:

1. Open the Navigator at https://crickles.org/app.
2. Tap the ⋮ menu at the top right and choose Add to Home screen (it may say Install app).
3. Confirm with Add (or Install).

Either way you’ll see the new Crickles icon and a name you can edit, and the shortcut then sits on your Home Screen, opening the Navigator in a single tap.

If you prefer, you can follow the same steps for the main Crickles website at https://crickles.org. To go from the main site to the Navigator just choose Navigator from the menu; to go from the Navigator to the main site just hit the big Crickles button in the top left of the screen.

A couple of things to expect:

• You may be asked to sign in once. A Home Screen shortcut keeps its own private sign-in, so the first time you open it you might need to log in again. It’s a one-off — after that Crickles remembers you and it’s a single tap each time.
• Already have a Crickles shortcut? It’s worth replacing. An existing shortcut keeps whatever icon it had when you first made it, so it won’t show the new one — and shortcuts created before these changes may not open reliably. Press and hold the old icon, choose to delete it, and add a fresh one using the steps above.

As ever, do get in touch if anything doesn’t look right.

Ian