Simply listening to the presentation was enough to get me interested in the app, so I was already downloading it while the presentation was still ongoing :p , although it was only until I got home before I really started playing with it.
In theory, it seems like it is just a RSS reader, and of course one can't get an iPad App of the Year award just by developing a RSS reader. What sets Flipboard apart from the rest is the UI/UX.
Flipboard was designed from scratch for iPad, and not a iPhone port over; it takes advantage of the big screen size and arranges feeds in the form of a magazine, which makes articles aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Different people have different interests in different topics; allowing users to choose which sources to subscribe to allow them to create highly personalised 'magazines' that present topics that they are interested in.
Organizing the articles under separate lists also helps users focus on particular topics. I haven't found the option to 'follow other people's lists' yet, but it doesn't really matter since there are already plenty of topics to follow up on.
I have not subscribed to the maximum number of sources allowed, but I am wondering if it can be circumvented by adding sources to Google Reader and use Flipboard to subscribe to the Reader. I suppose that will break the organization of articles a little, but it beats having nothing to read at all.
The lack of any method to clear Flipboard's cache is bad of course; the only explanation I can think of is that most users of Flipboard, and iPad in general, are not quite tech savvy enough to even know what is cache in the first place, so rather than confusing them with such options in its Settings, the developers omit it altogether. I don't know.
I like the fact that Flipboard concentrates on value adding first rather than making money, as advertisements, and basically any form of request for money or donations, might break the entire UX of Flipboard, something the developers will not want. But my opinion is that not many apps can pull this off.
One thing that I am a little unhappy with, however, is that Flipboard has a very limited offline reading mode. After a quick setup in school after lecture last night, I found out that I could not read many of the articles while on the train home. Its not quite difficult to see why though; many articles only offer short paragraphs of what they are about. To read the entire articles, one has to access them 'externally'. I guess Flipboard can't cache all that. Still I wish that Flipboard can improve on that. The News app on my Android phone pre-fetches text and they are enough to keep me occupied for my 45 min train ride.
All in all, Flipboard is a joy to use, that is if an Internet connection is available. The UI is clean, browsing and reading are easy, and on top of all that, its free. Its no wonder why it can be an iPad App of the Year.
That is certainly one of the grouses that I have about Flipboard - not being able to cache articles for offline reading (to the extent that I contemplated getting a 3G iPad, just for Flipboard :s ). I guess it would require a large amount of disk space to pre-cache all the articles, especially since most of them have images. On the other hand, a text-only approach of caching articles may actually ruin the entire reading experience, since the company prides on its ability to render both images and articles in a magazine layout.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of the points that Prof. Ben brought up during the HTML 5 workshop, when he asked Ruiwen how they are actually caching all the pages for offline mode. This might be an interesting computer science problem to solve (:
Very good critique..I stole your cache point for my post :D...Thanks a lot!
ReplyDeletehttp://cs3216v.blogspot.com/2011/09/criticism-my-best-friend.html
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http://cs3216v.blogspot.com
If only flipboard can work like dropbox and come up with something that can sync various platform so that we can read the magazine on our computer as well. One functionality they can consider implementing is the ability to share our own articles in the form of document formats to our friends such that they work like magazine.
ReplyDeleteAs for the cache problem, i do not know how dropbox did it. Basically i can view all my documents offline. Perhaps they can ask dropbox.
Ah, you mentioned donations. One problem that is going to be faced by developers in singapore is that we cannot accept donation from what i last tried. There wont be a donate button on paypal when registered with a sg credit card. This is quite sad because donations can be a motivation to developers. =(
One possible solution I feel that Flipboard can do is that to cache the text of some articles and display them in one of the tile. Even if the aticles lack images, I feel that it is a good compromise for users when they have no internet connection. As a user of Instapaper, even if the formatting of the page is quite bad, I still find it helpful and useful for times when I have no internet access.
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