Real Time Congress (Free)
Version – 1.0
REVIEW – “Let this app help you keep tabs on congress!”
Whatever your political views are I think most if not all of America agrees that one thing we all need to be doing is keeping a closer eye on Congress. The problem is that a lot of us have regular jobs and families that keep us busy and it seems that there are always things being done late at night and on weekends so we won’t find out about it. Well thanks to the Real Time Congress app for iPhone and iPod touch, it’s now possible to get real time information on what is going on in Congress for free!
When you open up Real Time Congress you’ll start out on the “Floor” screen. On this screen you can 
choose to view the latest information from either the House or the Senate floor. The updates are time-stamped and sorted under headings for the date that they are from. The list refreshes every time you open the app up, or you can choose to manually refresh it by pressing the button in the upper right corner of the screen.
The menu at the bottom has several other screens that are useful as well. The first one is the “Whip Notices” screen. Here you will find both daily and weekly whip notices for both the Republican and 
Democratic party. These notices help you get an idea of what the leadership of the party is currently trying to get accomplished.
The next two menu options are the 
“Hearings” and “Documents” pages. The hearings page currently has no information in it because there are no ongoing hearings but the “Documents” page has a lot of interesting information. This is where you’ll find documentation on all of the policies that have been passed/are being supported by congress. There are also GAO reports and a variety of other information including statements from the administrative branch of government.
The final tab holds an “About” link that will tell you about this app and its 
developers and the “News” tab which will give you headlines from several major news outlets. Something to note is that while the order I mentioned all of the pages is the order that they appear in the menu by default, the icon’s order is actually customizable. If you would rather have the “News” page be the first page you can do that easily by touching the “More” option and then touching the “Edit” button in the upper right corner and dragging the icons wherever you want them!
While it would have been nice to have some sort of push notification service for important things, this obviously would have forced the developer to charge for this currently free resource! My conclusion at the end of the day is that while this app may be a little drab, and it may lack some of the fancy features of other major news apps, the fact is that this app delivers accurate information in real time and is free! I would highly recommend this app to anyone, so head to the App Store and check it out today!
- David H.
Download Now!
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Developer – Sunlight Foundation
URL: http://realtimecongress.org/
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