Flipboard 4
Moving from news to “magazines”
Free Developer Flipboard, flipboard.com Platform Universal Requirements Requires iOS 9.0 or later
In its earliest incarnation, Flipboard allowed you to view social media feeds and other online content in a stylish viewer that prioritized visual presentation and ease of navigation. Later versions allowed you to “curate” your own magazines on specific topics by adding links to web pages and feeds, and to share those magazines.
Now, Flipboard takes that concept a stage further with “smart magazines.” The idea is that, rather than just allowing you to add content from specific publishers or on fairly broad topics such as sports or tech, Flipboard 4 drills down to allow you to specify niches within general areas of interest. It then builds a smart magazine from social media content and websites, based on your choices.
As before, you can “like” articles and add them to a read- later list, or create a new magazine for them. If an article is of no interest, you can also specify that you want to see fewer like it.
Each smart magazine has a cover image featuring a top story, and flipping it reveals three stories. Tap one and you’re taken to the source. Flip up and you move to another story. There’s no way to search magazines or to see a table of contents.
It all works very well, at least on iPhone. The iPad version, while named version 4, hasn’t been updated with the new smart magazine features. However, any magazines you create in the iPhone version will be available on your iPad – provided you’re logged into the same account.
There are obvious comparisons with Apple News, but these really are two very different beasts. While Apple News allows you to specify the type of stories you want to read, it’s limited to publishers who make their content available in the format required by Apple. But that also means that you can read an article without hitting a paywall, something you can’t do in Flipboard. While Apple News’ actual news stories are timely, those that appear on Flipboard are often a day or more out of date. It really is a magazine, not a news app.
Flipboard is free and uses ads to generate revenue. We found that while they occasionally got in the way, they didn’t interfere with content in the way that many website adverts do.
the bottom line. Longtime users may balk at the changes, but for many others Flipboard just became much more useful. Kenny Hemphill