Newspapers and magazines aren't dying; they're just changing venues. As news shifts online and goes mobile, we still love those gorgeous magazine spreads. Two free iPad apps, Flipboard and Editions by AOL, aim to give us exactly what we want, but which one does it best?
Flipboard. This app came out last year, and already it feels like an institution. Originally focused mainly on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, Flipboard has added much more content. It's now a personalized magazine of news and articles you like, mixed with Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, Google Reader, Instagram, and Flickr.
Inside Flipboard's gorgeous cover is a nine-space grid with your Facebook and Twitter accounts taking up spaces 1 and 2. The seven remaining spaces are preselected categories (you can delete 'em by touching and holding), and the last square is free for your own choices. Beyond that, there's a second page with 12 more squares to fill with partner news sources, such as Rolling Stone. Once added, tap the Rolling Stone square, and the screen fills with well-laid-out articles, like the best magazine you ever read. Slide your finger to turn the page or quick-scroll through by dragging the scrubber at the bottom.
If you're not into the built-in sources, type the URL or name of your favorite site, and Flipboard pulls in everything from its RSS feed to related Twitter and Facebook accounts. And you can add Flickr and Instagram users too. All in all. Flipboard is a dream app: solid, engaging, easy to use, and beautiful.
Editions by AOL. AOL's news magazine app debuted in August, and so far we like it a lot. Fire it up, and you get a classic wood-paneled background as the app digs within its sources—a recent update vastly sped up the load time. While Editions tailors content to your tastes, AOL aims to go further by curating the sources in each topic. You can tweak them, but you're merely accessing the same list and highlighting sources you prefer.
Interestingly, Editions isn't built around the 24/7 news cycle. You select when you want it "delivered," and that's the cutoff—stories posted after that time won't appear in that day's Editions. This is a deliberate move by AOL to create something with a beginning and an end, a retro concept that fits the magazine's design, which includes throwback fonts and Ben-Day dotted images on its cover.
You can also add your zip code for local news and weather and your birthday to get your horoscope. Logging in with Facebook adds upcoming events reminders. A small arrow at the bottom unleashes the magazine control panel, including a scrolling list of all the articles in that issue. Editions learns your interests from the stories you read, and each story also has tags that you can y or X to see more or less about those subjects.
The bottom line. We absolutely adore Flipboard—flawlessly executed and as personalized as you want it to be. It almost doesn't seem fair to compare Editions to it but the upstart also has us smitten. We're just old enough to appreciate Editions' limited timeframe and its finished nature. Since they're both free, we'll keep 'em with Flipboard as the go-to and Editions as the lazy-Sunday catch-up version.
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