With so many social media sites and news sources to keep up with, I find that viewing news from the original source is outdated and just doesn’t get the job done when looking for stories from a variety of different angles in a short amount of time.
So what if you could read the news you’re interested in, check out your social media feed in a beautifully designed magazine format, and send messages to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all in one app? Well now you can with the new Flipboard app.
The highly anticipated Flipboard for iPhone recently launched on December 8, bringing a news app worthy of an immediate download. Let’s take a look at some of its features.
1. Visual Wow Factor.
Let’s face it, in this high-tech world that craves innovative design, a visually stunning interface wins big points. From the category interface to the individual stories, every aspect of Flipboard combines intuitive and elegant design.
2. Newstopia.
If you’re a news junkie, get ready to feel like a kid in a candy store. With an impressive list of sources from the big news names to your favorite blogs, Flipboard has it all. In addition, you can search for any news source, find it’s RSS and add it as a new page.
3. Integrate Your Social Media.
Want to read articles from your favorite Twitter personalities? Simply authorize Twitter in your Flipboard app and presto, your Twitter feed becomes a beautiful magazine.
Flipboard allows you to share articles, choose to remove unwanted authors from your feed permanently, and favorite tweets in a flash. With the ability to connect and directly post anything (even if it has nothing to do with an article you just read) to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram all of your social media needs are covered.
Although Flipboard is the clear winner in our eyes for design, content and integration with social media, there are two additional must-have iPhone apps worth noting.
FLUD
FLUD lunched an updated version of its app on December 7, 2011. The newest upgrade enhances the visual appeal, allows you to save articles for later, or add them to an Instapaper account. Like Flipboard, FLUD provides a number of news sources to choose from. Unlike Flipboard, which chooses the articles from each source for you and allows you to read one headline at a time, FLUD provides a list of the most recent articles from each news source to peruse, and then allows you to select the headlines you find captivating.
FLUD also added a social news feature, which allows you to review the recommended reading of others you “follow.” As with most news apps, you can share articles to Twitter or Facebook.
Pulse
Last but certainly not least, Pulse is an excellent news aggregate with an intuitive interface and an easily customizable news layout. Pulse takes the overview of articles from one source a bit further by allowing a reader to browse articles from multiple news sources on a single page — getting the reader to the article of choice quickly.
Although it may not be as visually appealing as FLUD or Flipboard, its functionality, offline access to articles and social sharing capabilities make Pulse a strong contender in the news app space.
Overall, I would recommend downloading all three as each app approaches news consumption differently and provides the reader with different sources. However, if you are tight for space and have to choose one, our clear winner is the newcomer, Flipboard.
And remember…once you download your shiny new app it’s not complete without adding Culture-ist’s RSS feed to Flipboard!
