Wednesday, July 21, 2010

FlipBoard - Magazine Viewing on Your iPad - Hiding Some Articles


I downloaded the Flipboard app and was amazed at the quality and ease of use on my iPad.  It offers the user the ability to customize magazine for reading and viewing articles and photos, from Twitter and Facebook feeds.

You can add your own Twitter and Facebook feeds to the sections, however, as most young up and coming startups, the servers are quite overloaded on this first few days.  I believe that they have stated that they might do an invitation list to alleviate this strain on their servers and control the onslaught of new users for the app.

I have noticed a couple of interesting features that might not be so obvious to the user.  If you are fortunate to add your twitter account and start receiving articles in your newly created magazine, you will notice at the bottom of the page that there is a time line with dots, allowing you to search from latest to previous magazine articles.  At the present time, I haven't been able to go back much further than yesterday on their time line.  This will certainly be nice if their servers can handle the archive in a manner where you can retrieve back articles in your endless magazine stream.

Another thing that I noticed was that I was getting a stream of most of the people I am following on Twitter.  Now, I like to follow and sometimes ignore some others that are basically, what I consider as spam accounts.  I noticed that you can select a 'contributor's name' on a page and then click in the upper corner icon which looks like a square with curved arrow or reply icon.  You can reply to  an  article or photo right from the Flipboard app on your iPad.  You will also notice, a red button labeled 'Hide'.  This will be an important button for hiding those tweeters that you don't want to show up in your Flipboard magazine.  You can also retweet and share via email the article from your customized Flipboard pages.

If you choose to Hide a contributor and wish to change your mind and reinstate their articles, merely click on any contributor in your Flipboard magazine and the option to hide that contributor and a list of thoses you have hidden will appear and you can toggle back to Show. 

I also noticed a thumbs up (like icon), so I am assuming that there will be some sort of favorites rating system for your customization.

Flipboard also has a Facebook, Twitter, website and uses Get Satisfaction Support Board.  I shall enjoy exploring this innovative app and using it on my iPad.

Check out FlipBoard

1 comment:

Granny Joan said...

Thanks to Flipboard, they have already updated their app and fixed one problem that I reported.