Flipboard came out early last summer, and has become Apple’s iPad app of the year. Considering the hoopla surrounding the iPad and huge number of apps it has in the App store, this is quite an honor. The idea behind what Flipboard originally was to create a ‘magazine’ format to look over your own Facebook and Twitter feeds. They also added in a number of generic news feeds to round out the picture. This went over like wild fire, to the degree that they (the Flipboard people) seem to have been overwhelmed by the huge numbers of people loading this app on their new iPads. There were several weeks of spotty cove rage, and (I got it on the first day)I had to wait over a week to get my own Facebook and Twitter feeds set up to load into this app. You can look online for this inauspicious opening…
Nonetheless, in the succeeding months I have found that it has grown (I can add in my Google reader feeds…). The online noise and buzz surrounding this whole situation (the problems, and the media coverage of this new, ‘hip’ app) has led to what appears to be a flowering of similar iPad ‘magazines’ (to the detriment of many ‘one source’ magazines which cost (mostly per month)).
The biggest of these iPad news ‘magazines’ is Pulse News. This app (free, as is Flipboard), has more of a social news focus, versus Flipboard’s original Facebook/Twitter design.
Pulse news (as with a growing number of similar apps (re: FLUD) are easier to configure and have more (and easier to understand) options. This may be niggling, but on Flipboard, you can open an article and select to ‘read later’ from an icon at the top of the page. The ‘read later’ title would seem to suggest that you can save the article in Read it Later, but this actually takes you to Instapaper…like I said, this is not a game changer, but still…
For what it’s worth, I have been running Flipboard, Pulse News, Flud, and almost any other iPad based news and interest aggregator. And I find that Pulse News is certainly the easiest to use, the most powerful, and most often, the fastest to load.
My favorite new iPad app: Pulse News Reader
Over the last several months (since the advent of the iPad in April), I have heard that iBooks is the killer app for this platform, and then it was Instapaper, now it seems to be Flipboard… I have all of these apps (and they are all great apps!), but I wonder if there really is a singular ‘killer app’ for such a flexible platform…
