Hey everyone, I’m Chris and I’ll be filling on the iThing Of The Week while Michelle is away. If you’re a reader of the site you’ve probably seen me write a variety of random articles. I tend to write about news that interests me as it pops up and never on much of a set schedule. I’m looking forward to temporarily doing a column and giving you guys some weekly iOS app suggestions. I think it will be fun. This week we will be talking about one of my favorite apps, one I use everyday. The iThing Of The Week is an app called Flipboard.
Flipboard is a social-network aggregation tool that presents the news in a magazine-like format. Once you download the app you can choose to connect it to your social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook. The app will also ask for topic areas that interest you. With this information the application will create sections for each topic area. These are depicted as tiles on Flipboard. Its rather cool that the tiles update and show new content much like the Live Tiles seen in Windows 8.
Flipboard makes it really easy to share any of the news items you read. Simply hold your finger on one of the stories and it will pop up a new menu. This menu will allow a user to share the news via a variety of social media methods. But what I really like is that Flipboard is designed to work with another app called Pocket. Pocket, formerly Read it Later, is a service designed to maintain a list of articles a user would like to read later. I use it a lot with my research for podcasting. It makes it really easy to go back and find news articles to discuss on a podcast.
Flipboard is my go to app for reading news items and staying abreast of what all my friends are sharing. With the loss of Google Reader, Flipboard has helped to make it easier to be on top of the news. Now here’s the good news, Flipboard is a free app on iOS. And even better news for you non iOS users, Flipboard is available on both Android and Windows 8/Windows Phone 8. Give it a try and you won’t be disappointed.
