My first App of the Week review for YALSA was about Pulse, one of my favorite iPad apps for creating a personalized magazine from news feeds. Over the last several months several of this category of apps have launched. In this App of the Week column, I thought I’d change things just a bit and review a few of these apps (instead of reviewing just one for the week), note what is unique about each, and provide some ideas on how to choose what to use.
BroadFeed
Cost: 99 cents
This is the newest personalized magazine app with which I’m familiar. The idea is simple, use BroadFeed as a visual way to read through Tweets that include links. (The app only shows Tweets that contain links.) The setup is also simple. The first time you launch BroadFeed you type in your Twitter username and password and the app then imports the most recent postings from your feed.
The display of BroadFeed is appealing. News is shown in a grid with each story displaying a headline, the source, and a brief description. The stories are organized by popularity. Click on a story to open up the full content and once in the story view it’s possible to post a link to it on Facebook and Twitter or send a link via email. There’s also a “clean” link which shows the story without any extra web design elements which can improve readability.
Unique features of BroadFeed include the image grid. (As shown on the right.) Click on one of the images to see more details and to see a larger version of the image.
Another unique BroadFeed feature is the ability to choose the timeframe for which you want see feed content. The top of the screen provides a drop-down menu so you can select and view content from between the past 6 hrs and the past 2 weeks.
Flipboard
Cost: Free
When Flipboard launched it received quite a bit of buzz for its beauty and functionality. The app was named Apple’s Ipad App of the year for 2010. Over the past several months, Flipboard has made many changes that make the app somewhat different than other apps in this category.
The way Flipboard works is that a user can add a range of content feeds that are shown as separate categories (something like a table of contents) in the Flipboard interface. For example, my table of contents on Flipboard provides access to my Twi