So, the iPad. It’s a few weeks in and I don’t regret buying it, and I keep finding new uses for it (and every now and again, a new problem with it) and keep on enjoying it.
One interesting thing I find about the platform is how many people keep coming up with “revolutionary” applications for it. None more so than in the (social) news sector.
It seems that it’s not more than 7 days between the latest revolutionary app for reading news coming out promising to change the way we consume content – and then promptly failing at it.
The problem with all of these applications is that they are simply not flexible enough. While their interfaces my be interesting and they do a good job of rendering content in a pretty and nice-to-use way, the actual content is curated in a pretty plain and unimaginative way.
I want to take a look at the major players in the news apps, and see where they do well and where they fall down. I’m mostly not going for the newspaper or magasine type apps here – they are not innovative at all and are of no interest to me. What interests me are the curation type apps, with interesting layout models and those that really take advantage of the iPad’s unique platform.