The best streamlined news delivery application in iOS
The creation of the internet has helped to single-handedly
reshape how we as a society get our news. It’s wasn’t necessarily hard to find
news before the birth of the web, in fact we still had newspapers, word of
mouth, televisions, and radios. The internet basically super-charged these
items, formulating them into one cohesive pile that was always available as
long as you were near a web connection. This helped to revolutionize how we exchange
idea and information and we now receive news faster than we ever thought
possible
Flipboard
Thankfully, the folks at Flipboard Inc sought a way to solve
the ‘over-saturization’ of websites. Their solution comes in the form of
Flipboard, an incredibly useful and streamlined news delivery application for
use on iOS. Flipboard is not a ‘news source’ but rather a platform that allows
you to combine news sources you already frequent into one easy to view
location.
When you first open Flipboard on your iOS device, you’ll be
able to choose from a multiple set of generalized niches. There are things
like; food, gaming, technology, sports, entertainment, and a variety of other
headings to get you started. Choosing is a topic will place it into your custom
generated ‘Flipboard Magazine.’ These general categories usually contain news
from some of the more popular websites on the subject. Once your magazine is
generated, you are free to flip through it and add your own news feeds.
When you first
open Flipboard on your iOS device, you’ll be able to choose from a multiple set
of generalized niches.
Each new feed will show up as its own square within the
application. Clicking on a square will take you to the main page for that
website. There you will see all of the current news and articles and can easily
browse through them from within the application. Adding a new feeed is very
simple. Clicking on a square labeled more will take you to a handy little
search menu. From here, you can type in a website, a subject, or virtually
anything that you’re interested in adding.
It isn’t all about dedicated news sites either. You can add
things like weather, recipes, reviews, or anything else that suits your
personal tastes. Flipboard acts as much like a social media outlet as it does a
personalized magazine. When you initiate a search you are not only seeing RSS
and news feeds, you’re also seeing hits for things like Facebook pages, Twitter
feeds, and even Tumblr blogs. This means that you can add your friends to your
Flipboard, as well as some of the more obscure things on the web. Maybe it’s a
local business which you frequent that you know uses social media to advertise?
Is there a specific celebrity chef you adore? By adding their page to your
Flipbook, you’ll always be up to date on their announcements and you’ll see
them as you’re browsing through your personal magazine.
You can add things
like weather, recipes, reviews, or anything else that suits your personal
tastes.
The app will automatically create space for you, much like
the iPhone or iPad will. When you fill up a page with squares, the app
automatically starts a new page and these pages can be accessed by flipping
through them. You can also organize your created links by dragging them back
and forth between pages. Maybe you prefer your links to be categorized
according to type, with a specific genre located on each page. Flipboard can do
this, giving you a fully customized and organized magazine that changes each
and every time news is broken. Because it isn’t its own media outlet, the
magazine updates whenever your favorite websites do. That means you’re getting
access to information on the fly, regardless of where you are, provided there
is a wifi or cellular connection available.
Flipboard also doubles as an interactive social photo album.
Imagine a place where you can have all of your Facebook photos and Instagram
shots in once generalized area. You can also culminate your own photos with
your friends and even celebrities that use either of the social media outlets.
In fact, recent updates of Flipboard have added support for popular services
like; LinkedIn, Google Reader, SoundCloud, Flickr, RenRen, Sina Weibo, and
500px. This opens your personalized magazine to house practically anything and
everything you could ever want in the world of information and social media.
Recent updates
have also brought forth tools for the visually impaired and the ability to
combine Flipboard with other useful applications
Recent updates have also brought forth tools for the
visually impaired and the ability to combine Flipboard with other useful
applications. For example, you can now use Flipboard in conjunction with the
popular Readability tool. This allows you to save articles to read later on
Flipboard. This is useful for situations when you know you’ll be doing a lot of
reading but won’t be near a high-speed internet connection. This app also works
with Apple’s VoiceOver tool which allows the visually impaired to listen to
articles rather than read them. This also works for individuals who wish to
hear the news read to them while they relax. There are also new recommended
audio feeds that were custom made for Flipboard. A wide variety of these
recorded audio files help to spice up the application even more.
Flipboard isn’t just a local phenomenon either. Its slowly
becoming a global tool as the company continues to release language and
localization upgrades. They recently attached full Japanese support to the app,
allowing users to change the native language between English and Japanese.
Flipboard has expressed that it would like to bring the program to even more
countries and is actively working on making that expectation a reality. This is
helping to transcend cultures when it comes to social media, and is allowing native
speakers to understand foreign language and practices.
Flipboard has
expressed that it would like to bring the program to even more countries and is
actively working on making that expectation a reality.
Flipboard may seem like an expensive app with a lot of
features but the program is one-hundred percent free to download and operate.
There are no hidden costs or in-app purchases and there aren’t really any ‘ads’
that randomly pop up to annoy you. This is an amazing tool and definitely one
of the best available for iOS. Time Magazine has already named this tool one of
the Top Fifty Most Innovative to date. This is a must have application for the
news or social media enthusiast.
