Recently I have been fortunate enough to purchase an iPad 2. I waited over a year to buy one, knowing that a second-generation device from Apple has always been a smarter purchase. When I brought home the iPad, I wanted to find some apps that could help me become better organized with my online reading. So I have been testing a few and thought I would share my experience with five of the apps that I have found useful.
Feedly
I have been a fan of Feedly for a while now. I really liked the editorial layout of the website. It brought a nice layer of usability to the overwhelming number of RSS feeds I have stored in my Google Reader account. I decided to give the app a try and see how the experience compared. The Feedly app did not disappoint. I was able to quickly dive into my feeds and start catching up on months of stories and articles. A strong grid layout makes the presentation easy to read and navigate. From a user-interface perspective, I really love how the pages flow from feed to feed. On the bottom left of the screen is a toggle to jump to any of your feeds. The app also provides “suggested feeds” based on the feed you are currently reading. If I had one criticism, it would be that the hidden feature of marking a page as “read” or “unread” is accomplished by swiping your finger up and down. I love the feature now that I know how to use it, but I discovered it by accident, and it took me a few tries to replicate what I had done to discover it. However overall, I love this app.
Flipboard is an app that combines your social news with other news sources to create a “social magazine.” Flipboard does a really nice job of pulling in content from your Facebook and Twitter feeds and presenting it in a very easy-to-read format. A nice feature of this app is that it scans the content of the tweets and updates and pulls through any content that is referenced through a link or page. So instead of just seeing a bunch of links in your news stream, you can read the actual article (with photos) on the screen without having to click a link. This is a very simple idea that executes nicely and makes it easier to explore your social magazine. Flipboard also currently has a large number of news sources that you can add to your magazine to discover new stories not in your social stream. Lastly, it can tie into your Google Reader account to pull all of your RSS feeds together. I have been using Flipboard on the agency iPad for a while now and truly enjoy the experience that this app provides.
Pulse
I have found Pulse to be an interesting alternative to Flipboard. Pulse has chosen to showcase its content with a very nice side-scrolling presentation. Pulse also provides you with multiple columns in which to add your news sources so you can organize your content feeds. Like Flipboard, Pulse has aggregated numerous news sources to add to your story lists. But there are two differences between these apps that stand out to me. For one, Pulse does not allow you to add your social feeds to your stories, so I am unable to intertwine feeds from content providers and my friends. Secondly, a nice feature that Pulse does provide is that you can cherry-pick specific feeds from your Google Reader account to display. I like this feature a lot. I can barely keep up with all my feeds, but if I wanted to bubble up a select few, this app lets me do it.
Showyou
Showyou is a different type of content curation app. The premise of Showyou allows you to watch videos that your friends are sharing in their social streams. Showyou has two different display modes: one is called “the grid” and the other, “the feed.” The grid works more like a virtual video wall. It will show videos from your social network connections by displaying thumbnails of the videos with title and contributor. You pan around this virtual wall of videos to view the videos that have been shared. In addition, the grid is peppered with videos that are popular with other Showyou users. I was able to watch a slick street dancer from Paris that @GuyKawasaki shared with his followers. The feed is a more streamlined look at content shared by Showyou users that you have chosen to follow. The content is more traditional in layout and allows for video to be shown inline.
If I had to change one thing, I would build in a toggle that will allow the users to choose if they want to view videos outside of your network. I ran across a lot of videos that were in foreign languages or just not my taste in content. Great for exploring, but sometimes I would like to remove the clutter.
Hitpad
And finally there is Hitpad. Hitpad is more about what is current and trending, rather than waiting for your favorite RSS feeds to update and refresh. It gathers what they call “rich bite-size information snippets about the important and worth-knowing topics of the day so you become current in no time and with very little effort.” What that really means is that they supply a large array of content that you search by keyword or source to read about topics that are currently trending. It spans a nice range of formats covering news feeds, tweets, videos, photos and content of websites. It also has a nice presentation for the format. I do like how you can get a quick check on the pulse of trending topics.
On the other hand, the most customization that this app allows is by using a keyword search. This is great for topline trends, but it limits the user by providing only select keywords. The user should be able to enter a wide variety of topics to search. I asked @hitpadapp if a customization feature was forthcoming and was told that it indeed was in the works. According to the product video, the content will become personalized over time based on your browsing habits. I look forward to seeing how this product evolves for me and will be very interested in the software development cycle.
These five apps provide a wide range of opportunities for viewing your news feeds on your iPad. Download these apps and let me know which ones work for you.
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