In our day and age, it’s so easy to be led into consuming content that agrees with your own opinions. For example, one of my favorite news apps is from the BBC. It has a great layout and a broad range of news categories. It’s even possible to customize the subjects that you see in your news feed, which is ideal for getting content related to your areas of interest.
The only problem is that all the news is from one news provider and therefore from a single perspective. Some people might not see this as a problem but I’ve been thinking recently that I would like to broaden my understanding, especially into unfamiliar subjects.
The likes of Google News and Inoreader are good options but my personal new favorite is Flipboard. This social magazine enables you to pick from thousands of topics before populating all the best stories based on your interests. You can also create your own magazine of curated stories and share them with others.
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps that we couldn't live without. Read them all here.
To understand why I love Flipboard so much, I need to take you back to my 15-year-old self. My biggest interest at the time was films, and with an unlimited cinema pass, I was able to indulge my cinematic desires. Watching the latest blockbuster films and alternative indie offerings was only half the fun, though. I also loved reading about how films were made and what new releases were coming soon. I was able to do this thanks to the magazine Empire.
As each monthly issue made its way through the postal system, I used to wait with eager excitement to get my hands on the magazine. There was something about receiving a physical product and the feeling of thumbing through the pages. The whole process brought me a lot of joy and much of that stemmed from the format.
Fast forward 25 years and even though you can still buy physical magazines, including Empire, most people engage with content digitally, me included. It’s impossible to replicate the same experience with a digital magazine but Flipboard has given it a pretty good go.
To mimic the turning of pages, Flipboard transitions between pages of headlines with a page flip animation. It’s pretty basic but it’s better than the endless scrolling that is common to social media feeds. There is a scroll mode but I prefer the magazine flip option. My only criticism is that the flip occurs vertically rather than horizontally. The latter is the standard implementation for almost all magazines so it's confusing that Flipboard opted for something different.
News feeds are populated by first selecting a set of topics, curators, and magazines that you’d like to follow. Flipboard offers a wide range of options, but I chose UK News, English Football, Photography, and Technology. This gave me a good spread of topic types and represented the news that I was most interested in. It’s possible, at any time, to update these topics so if the results are not working for you, then just select some new topics.
Other than your personalized news feed, it is also possible to discover more content through the Explore tab. Here, you can browse by category and dive into Magazines. I particularly love the Community tab, which lets you browse featured curators and discover new content. You might find specific curators that you want to keep going back to and this is one of Flipboard's most powerful features. It isn’t just made up of the news that Flipboard wants you to see; you can also get independently curated content.
As for reading the content, one of the best things about Flipboard is the Reader View. it turns the text white and overlays it on a black background, making it much easier to read. It also strips away all the menus that are visible on the web version and removes any distracting advertisements. This makes the experience a lot more pleasurable than just reading a set of web articles.
Flipboard is an innovative alternative to experiencing news content. By centering the reader’s experience around flipping pages, and curating magazines, the creators have produced an app that stands apart from almost all other news apps. Considering it’s free, why not give it a go and see if it transforms your experience of reading news?
