Reader is dead, long live Flipboard!

The news earlier this year that Google would be retiring its workhorse Reader software was met with a low-level grumbling.

This was, after all, one of the most widely-used RSS readers available on the market and people were understandably miffed, many having spent months or years searching the vastness of the internet to pinpoint the best websites and blogs on a given topic.

Reader brought all of these disparate feeds together, offering you a list of potential topics that could be browsed at your leisure.

Flipboard is the evolution of the reader. And it’s jumped straight from the primordial soup into the driving seat of a Bugatti Veyron.

OK, that may be a slight over-exaggeration, but the clumsiness and clunkiness of Reader was always a bit off-putting.  Flipboard, on the other hand, is smooth as silk and classier than Ron Burgandy’s moustache.

So what is it?

“Flipboard is on a quest to transform how people discover, view and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media.”

Originally created as an iPad app, the popularity of Flipboard soon saw it…er…flip over to the iPhone, before an Android version was brought to the market in 2010.

Formatted as a magazine, Flipboard brings together feeds from numerous partner sources and publications, alongside your own Twitter and Facebook accounts.  This provides you with a beautifully laid out, pictorially-driven magazine, automatically updated with fresh content every time that you open it.

In a rush? The handy Cover Stories section is the aggregator’s aggregator, pulling together the most read and shared stories from your various feeds into one place.

Lovely.

So how does it work?
As with any news app, when first configuring Flipboard you’ll be promoted to tell it what topics you’re interested in. There is a decent selection of starter-for-tens to choose from including all of the usual suspects (art, sport, business, politics, science, etc.) and the option to compile your own magazine from the searchable database of more targeted subject matter.

Opening any of the topics (which are all laid out as their own magazines, by the way) will show you a teaser of the articles within, each of which can be tapped through to the main content.

In turn, the next article is accessed by ‘flipping’ the current screen either vertically on a mobile device or horizontally on the iPad, watching one half fold over the other to reveal the next page beneath.
Clever, huh?

Articles can be saved into your own magazine, favourited or forwarded to friends, acquaintances and colleagues through the usual channels.

Sharing is caring!

Handily, Flipboard comes complete with a ‘Read it Later’ button which really comes into its own if – like me – you find yourself saving several hundred web pages a day to Pocket or Instapaper.

You can even select which web service you want to use to open links. Mind = blown.

As a die-hard Chrome fan, this feels like a step in the right direction. Apple: take note.

Even the menu is designed to enhance your experience, encouraging you to explore other topics and magazines, with a one-click subscribe function that will integrate the content you are browsing with your own magazine, or let you check out all of the content shared by individual contributors.

So is it any good?

Frankly: yes.

Flipboard has raised $60.5 million in funding from a host of financial houses and private individuals, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Dustin Mokovitz (the other Facebook co-founder) and Ashton Kutcher.

The partners providing the content aren’t particularly small-fry either, with publications of note including the Huffington Post, BBC, Telegraph, Times, NME and Economist.

The ability to incorporate your own Facebook and Twitter feeds into the magazine is a great touch and there is even a ‘Best of Instagram’ magazine available, which should fill your quota of ‘ordinary things looking arty because there’s a black and white filter on them’.

Not only is Flipboard smooth and intuitive, but unbelievably it’s also free.

Download it now from the Apple store and (presumably) from the Android thingy. Marketplace.  That’s the one.

Plague Inc. has completely infected me

It's no secret that I like games. I remember playing a lot of games in my (often misspent) childhood and so being essentially addicted to the iPhone, it's only natural that these two things come together in the form of what feels like several thousand pounds spent at the App Store.

It does, however, sometimes seem that like the iconographic trope of the snake eating its own tale, often the games industry will create an infinite loop of absurdity, generally through unnecessary money making spin-offs.

For instance, I have spent many, many hours competing on Words with Friends (to varying degrees of success), only to read recently that they are going to make a board game out of the app. Surely this is just Scrabble, no?

In order to avoid this cyclical nightmare (oh, another jumping game? Really?!) I'm always on the lookout for different, innovative ways of chipping away at my free time.

Most recently, this has manifested itself through Plague Inc., an indie game developed by one-man-band  Ndemic Creations.

OK, I'm a bit behind the times on this one as the game was initially released a year ago, has been downloaded over 10 million times, was a runner-up at the 2012 IGN Game of the Year Awards, but it's rare for a game to get under my skin (no pun intended) in the way that Plague Inc. has managed.

The main display: simple and intuitive, letting you get on with infection!

A global domination-style strategy game, Plague Inc. puts you in control of an infectious disease, with the overall objective of infecting and killing every person on the planet. Nice. You pick a starting country from which to infect your patient zero and then progress through the game by tweaking transmission methods, symptoms and special abilities, such as drug resistance or durability in hot/cold climates.

These abilities are upgraded through specific trees, with each level purchased through DNA Points, the in-game currency, which are earned by ensuring widespread infection.

The 'Transmission' tree: note the three bars at the bottom

As well as being frustratingly difficult at times, Plague Inc. offers an immense replay value, with each of the unlockable plague types - ranging from the humble starting Bacteria to a fully-fledge BioWeapon via Virus, Fungus, Parasite, Prion and NanoVirus-type infections.

New plague types are unlocked by eliminating humanity in the Normal or Brutal game types, while the sandbox-style Casual setting lets you infect a world where no one washes their hands, research doctors essentially sleep at their desk and 'sick people are given hugs' to really explore your plague potential.

Humans can, however, fight back against your plague: the more terrifying the disease, the faster the global scientific community will start to work on a cure. While this process can be delayed by spending precious DNA Points, success in anything except Causal mode will require the careful balancing of transmission, severity and lethality with each plague type affecting these modifiers in its own way.

Upgrade your plague's abilities, making it stronger and harder to eliminate

Development of different resistance and transmission-types can be amended throughout the game, depending on the region that you're trying to infect.

Basically, if you create a hemorrhagic monster that turns people inside out, you're going to generate a lot of attention, which means that the games version of the World Health Organisation is going to put you on the watch-list and start working on a cure almost immediately, further amping the game's difficulty.

As the goal of the game is to kill all humans, not just infect them, it can often be a race against time as you try to find ways of infecting the populations of countries that have sealed their borders before a cure can be delivered.

Checking on your disease's progress is assisted through a huge number of different charts and graphs, which can help you to understand how your plague is shaping up and where you need to focus your attention to secure maximum infection.

One of Plague Inc's many handy graphs!

Basically, Plague Inc. is like Risk, only you're microscopic and playing against the whole world.

Plague Inc. elevates itself above other, similar strategy games through its ingenious approach to the genre, with a dark and slightly silly sense of humour and real-life modelling of infection.

Now please wash your hands and download this game from the App Store.

You can name your plague! I called mine 'Shatner'.