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.
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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.
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