Flipboard: A social magazine for your iPad

http://www.flipboard.com/

by ssclafani • 16 years ago

126 50 16 years ago

ddewey• 16 years ago

It seems like an obvious idea in retrospect, and it fits with the iPad concept-- not a necessity, but a much more satisfying way of doing some specific tasks.

I wonder what its integration with the browser is like? I'm not sure if it'd be better to have a separate app for my Google Reader and Hacker News, but those are both sources I'd like to read in this format.

necubi• 16 years ago

It's a neat concept, but it seems they still have some issues to work out. I'm getting a login error when trying to log in to facebook, and none of the other channels are loading any content.

Edit: Facebook's still not working, but the other channels are. One thing's for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad.

tdfx• 16 years ago

I just got an error about them being "over capacity". Apparently they're not ready for all the press they've been getting the past few hours..

erikstarck• 16 years ago

My prio is: make it work, make it pretty, make it fast. I guess they put pretty before work.

I would actually like to do that as well but my sense for design is not up to their standards.

extension• 16 years ago

One thing's for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad

Really? There are no comments, you can't login, and you have to bounce to Safari to actually read anything. It doesn't even look that slick. What's the point?

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

I agree that this is not a real HN browser. But it does suggest a great design direction for a real HN browser.

Damn, I need a second set of working hours to spend learning Cocoa and/or HTML5!

slantyyz• 16 years ago

Have you guys tried Reeder? It's a general purpose RSS reader, but right now (for me anyways), it's the least annoying iPad app for Hacker News.

ynniv• 16 years ago

There are no comments

Sold!

Well, obviously not since I'm participating in them, but wow are comments over-rated.

dot• 16 years ago

I'm impressed with the video and can't wait to try it. I love startups that improve the way we interact with all the content bombarded at us.

Timothee• 16 years ago

Interview and more "real-life" demo with Robert Scoble:

http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-rev...

I really like that kind of re-presentation of content. The "Times" app does something similar on Mac for feeds.

At least visually, I find it very appealing. I don't know if it's because of the variety of layout, or if somehow decades of newspapers and magazines have taught us to like content displayed in a certain way, but I feel that I'd be more interested in reading articles like this.

However, in the case of Times, (which admittedly doesn't look nearly as sexy as this) I ended up not using so much and going back to Google Reader…

ejwcom• 16 years ago

Does not use xAuth for Twitter account addition, which seems strange.

edog1203• 16 years ago

Actually, it does use xAuth for Twitter.

davepeck2• 16 years ago

"The stuff you care about, all in one place."

Except the stuff I care about will never be in just one place. Somehow "more stuff you care about, all in yet another place" doesn't have the same ring to it.

To be clear: I don't mean to knock Flipboard. I'm very impressed with their high quality work, and I'm sure it can be a fun and useful tool. I'm just interested in the broader notion of "all in one place."

My hypothesis is that there will never be "one true venue" for finding news. We're foragers by nature. Our valuation of a piece of content is (in part) proportional to how hard that content was to find. We will always seek new venues for content discovery.

credo• 16 years ago

You make very good points.

However, I suspect that the app will do very well without users like you and me.

I haven't yet tried out the app, but it does seem like they are meeting the needs of a large market (and seem to have impressed a lot of "tech journalists")

axod2• 16 years ago

large market? or vocal market?

Tech journalists like to make out that everyone is sitting in their home tweeting. It's just not the reality though.

davepeck2• 16 years ago

I don't think they're exclusive.

One corollary of "we will always seek new venues for content discovery" might be "there will always be opportunity in [interesting] new venues for content discovery." Flipboard, Pulse, etc. represent a fresh new category of venues.

macrael3• 16 years ago

Hurray for Adam Lisagor. His videos are great. He also did work for square, I wonder if this is going to become a trend.

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

And http://birdhouseapp.com/

These tech product demos by him are getting played out pretty fast.

macrael3• 16 years ago

Played? They are great!

TimH• 16 years ago

Odd thing to say. Birdhouse app is Adam's app btw. He made it with Cameron Hunt.

charliepark• 16 years ago

Adam's videos have a rare combination of sincerity, great writing, and excellent production values. I don't know what he charges to make these, but I'd love to hire him to promote our app. His work is great.

jaytee_clone• 16 years ago

I'm curious how are they are going to solve the problem that most people hate to learn new interfaces of their old tools.

For example, it took me a while to start using google reader, google calendar. I told all my friends how great those tools are, but none of them has converted.

People are used to their twitter, facebook, newspaper interfaces. Crossing the chasm from early power users to mainstream users will be hard.

benatkin• 16 years ago

To me, viewing linked images and articles from twitter is a whole different app. So it's less about convincing them to upgrade and more about convincing them that they need the new app IMO.

aik• 16 years ago

I don't have an iPad but I'm seriously impressed by that website and the video production quality. Well done. I wish I could try it out.

jrnkntl2• 16 years ago

"Flipboard is currently over capacity, please try and add your Twitter account later"

Ehm, wtf? Why does it even need a Flipboard server? What happens to my twitter account info? All they need is a XAuth token, right?

jessep• 16 years ago

A friend of mine did something kinda similar. They might be somehow scraping/processing the twitter/facebook links. Ends up being pretty processor intensive.

milestinsley• 16 years ago

It would appear they are doing some server side magic to determine which stuff shows up (hence the need for their own server):

"...Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out."

Quoted from: http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-rev...

jrnkntl2• 16 years ago

That makes sense, but I'd like to see some more transparent feedback with regards to my privacy then.

Something like: "We need to send your Twitter/Facebook stream to our servers to work our magic and present you only the signal instead of the noise"

stevederico• 16 years ago

This is a marvelous app. I really appreciate your attention to detail and simplicity throughout the UI. The application feels very natural and provides a lot of information while not being bombarding. I plan to use this as my primary HN reader however, I did not see an upvote mechanic available. Overall, I really like the product and hope to see it succeed. I would, and I am sure other will, pay around $1.99 for an app like this.

Addition features: offline mode Google reader integration with like and share buttons Post article to blog

Regards,

Steve

malloreon• 16 years ago

Can you only add 7 feeds (+facebook +twitter) to the contents page? I want to add like 30.

faramarz2• 16 years ago

This promo video feels a lot like what Square had. In fact the main guy looks like the same guy in Square's video demo. I wonder if there is a Square (read Jack Dorsey) connection with this product.

Looks great. I don't have an iPad to use it, but the interaction in the video looks promising.

[Edit] I Just read that Jack Dorsey is one of Investors. perhaps that explains the video demo similarities. same resources?

macrael3• 16 years ago

The man who is in the video (and who made the video (videos, actually)) is Adam Lisagor a.k.a. @lonelysandwich. He is part of You Look Nice Today and does the videos for Put This On.

faramarz2• 16 years ago

Thanks mate. He really does a great job playing the customer while promoting the product.

metachris• 16 years ago

http://adamlisagor.com/

pclark• 16 years ago

This will get users because it looks gorgeous. I doubt they will keep coming back.

This is all essentially duplicate content. I see these links already in twitter and facebook. All this does is display them prettily. And people hate seeing stuff that is "new" that they've already seen. Better to show no content.

All the feedback set out in the Apollo News thread applies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520941

IMHO. Brilliant execution on a flawed concept.

arvinb• 16 years ago

I agree. It could just be another novelty app.

mechanical_fish3• 16 years ago

I'm not as convinced. You can use this thing as a Twitter client, can you not? I've been expecting Twitter clients to evolve into this; this is a nice stab at it.

I miss the linearity. Twitter is linear; it has a timeline. This would seem to be a nonessential feature, perhaps even a limitation, and yet I miss it when I do not see it. I feel disoriented. Though maybe if I use this Flipbook app for a while I will find it is still there, just slightly obscured.

I might prefer to read some twitter feeds as tweets, and others through an app like this. Time for multiple Twitter accounts, perhaps.

A very interesting experiment.

donohoe• 16 years ago

  {"success":false,"errormessage":"flipboard is over capacity"}

axod2• 16 years ago

I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want this. I can already do all of those things...

headsclouds• 16 years ago

I don't know about this application, but I haven't yet seen one achieve the goal they all share, and that's making the result of aggregating all those sources not seem like cacophonous noise. It seems to me that the moment you stuff all your feeds in there and connect all those accounts the content just kind of stops to matter, there's too much of it and I lose interest in reading any of it.

Content needs exclusivity, at least in my opinion. That’s why I still use feeds for notification of new content and I always consume it on the original site.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

That flip animation is really annoying. It doesn't make any sense either; you fold your active page mid-page to progress? Wouldn't that just fold half of the page and reveal another half of the underlying page, were it real? It uses the metaphor of a book with two pages - one on both sides - for a single-page layout.

I don't get it, but maybe testing showed that people liked it?

fredoliveira• 16 years ago

I'm quite sure there was no real testing here (heck, there isn't in most other apps anyway). I quickly showed this to the guys in the office and everyone found the animation to be weird and confusing. Some tried to flip the other side of the screen to see if it would reveal anything else.

I guess they were trying to justify their name and logo.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

>I guess they were trying to justify their name and logo.

It seems like a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. :)

I just can't figure out why they would want it in the first place. I assume they did beta testing.

danmelnick• 16 years ago

I wonder if they actually licensed that music for use in that video? If my ear is correct it's The Bad Plus. I hope they did license it.

smackfu2• 16 years ago

Bizarre that they are cutting off the articles in mid-sentence and then kicking you out to Safari. In many cases, they are not even long articles. There just isn't any scrolling functionality at all.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I'm not impressed by the functionality of the app (though of course lots of others may like it) but I am impressed by the slickness of their video production. Very Apple-y.

Flipboard: A social magazine for your iPad

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