Monday, April 22, 2013

Flipboard

I recently posted a long ramble about being very late to the smartphone "evolution". One reason, of many, which I'd held off for so long was because I could predict the amount of time I'd "waste" messing around and tinkering with the phone and the apps installed on it. I was right.

I'm sure that it won't really be news to anyone that Flipboard is an amazing app. I'm such a fan of feed based news and information ingestion that I have used my own rss aggregator for years, so obviously one of the first apps I needed to find was an rss / news reader. Flipboard won out over Google Currents and the handful of other rss readers I checked out.

With that said, I had to put together my own specially crafted rss feeds to be truly happy. What I've done is create new feeds of my favourite sources using yahoo pipes which have images included in the body of each post, so that Flipboard displays the image, headline and snippet in a good looking way. I then added these rss feeds to my Google Reader account. While Google has announced that Reader is being killed off in July, it is currently the best way to get new feeds added to Flipboard. Just add your G.Reader account in the accounts settings in Flipboard. Then you can add each separate feed to an icon link on the main Flipboard screen for easy access.

Here's the list of feeds which I've created: