In the first of our new mobile app review series, associate director at Brands2life, Armand David, gives the Flipboard app his seal of approval
Flipboard for iPad is a free ‘social magazine’ application. It draws information from a number of different source ‘feeds’ you put into it, including Twitter feeds, your Facebook newsfeed, your Google Reader subscriptions or even just a plain old RSS feed from any website, and displays it in a rather impressive magazine-style layout. The latest version adds LinkedIn profile and news updates, via ‘LinkedIn Today’.
This app empowers busy people to catch up with their news – whether that’s social or traditional news or updates – on the move, in a significantly more engaging manner than traditional newsreaders.
Most of us are sufficiently short on time. The list of unread items in our newsreaders grows inexorably as the days pass, eventually reaching a point of such unmanageable weight that we just decide to abandon it forever, or give in and hit the ‘mark all as read’ button in Google Reader. Clearly, for busy marketers trying to keep tabs on their own brands, as well as the competition, ignoring what’s happening in the world is not an option.
Design
The app has a beautiful, tactile, intuitive user interface that is an absolute joy to use. Swipe (or ‘flip’) to turn ‘pages’, tap to expand stories, play videos in the app or share/like stories – the execution of all of this is very slick and easy-to-use. There are some helpful gesture features; double tap to close stories, and following its latest update, a single tap expands an article in full magazine-style splendour.
A split screen view shows you the story as it was shared (e.g. in a tweet from a friend or professional contact), the full story – retrieved from the shared link – in a magazine layout, and the story in its original incarnation. And you can take a pick as to whether to dive into the story in full or flip on to the next item in that feed once you’ve read the headline and opening paragraph.
The magazine layout is very clever; providing bigger stories or photo-stories for that content, and laying out plain-text updates (e.g. tweets or status updates with no links) as ‘news in briefs’ columns. The overall impact is very engaging indeed.
Functionality
The app covers most bases very well. The most popular social networks are covered and the new LinkedIn feature makes it even more useful for business networking and keeping up with the industry news your professional contacts are reading and sharing.
A red ‘ribbon’ across the top of the app gives users the option to easily find and discover new feeds to follow, and the overall interaction in the app is very natural for a user of Apple iOS devices – including a ‘long-tap’ to rearrange or close the ‘tiles’ that make up the different feeds you have set up to follow.
The offline access is decent as long as you remember to sync up while connected to download the latest stories, although this limits your ability to interact with embedded video content or to ‘like’ or share any content directly from the app.
Places where I hope Flipboard will improve in future include the creation of an aggregated news feed, so that I don’t have to choose which feed in particular I want to explore but can review all my news updates in reverse chronological order. Another ‘wishlist’ item is improved offline access and widened platform support. Longer term, if Flipboard could de-duplicate shared items that would be wonderful, as many of my contacts share the same content on multiple networks – e.g. syndicating their tweets to both Facebook and LinkedIn.
