image by jorgeq82@flickr

I’ve been checking out Flipboard ever since it got nominated as the iPad App of 2010. As an avid user of Google Reader and RSS (and recently Pulse), it was initially hard to see what the hype was about. Magazine style format? The future of media? Seriously?

Two weeks onward, Flipboard became the primary reason for turning on my iPad. The smoothness of the browsing experience, attenuated by the attention to detail here and there, suddenly made the routine task of feed-reading much more enjoyable.

Without repeating what’s been said about the app (See this and this for good reviews), there are several attributes about Flipboard that I found particularly intriguing:

1. Page flipping effect – simple yet immensely effective. This little effect single-handedly created the app’s magazine experience, to the extent that the contents themselves didn’t really matter. One can arguably say that due to this transition effect, Flipboard feels a lot more magazine-like than “real” e-magazine apps like Zinio.
   

   image from blogs.chron.com

2. Speed – it’s easy to tell that a great deal of caching is taking place behind the scenes. Images and site snippets almost appear in no-time. Again, the page flipping effect has a lot to do with this. While the user’s focus is being hijacked by the slick transition, objects on the next page are busily being pre-rendered so that most of the page would be ready for viewing when the transition is over.It’s impressive how one little trick served the dual purpose of defining an app’s identity as well as boosting the perceived performance of its users. Funny enough, the residing door sequences in the original Resident Evil game comes to mind.
3. Fluid Grid Layout Engine – Flipboard arranges feed content into neatly organized grids to compose a virtual broadsheet newspaper. The interesting thing is that the Flipboard would attempt to choose a layout composition most suitable to the content at hand. For instance, articles containing a landscape image would be placed at the topmost slot spanning across the entire breadth of the screen, while a tweet linking to a Facebook album would be given a full page treatment.
   

   image by netzkobold@flickr.com

4. Readable Content – Flipboard extracts the most relevant section from the corresponding web site for display. Gone are ads, banners and all the other distractions that are most unwelcome on the iPad. The Flipboard reader is shown in-line, without annoying back-and-forth hopping between the app and mobile Safari.

Of course that’s not all but these few features were enough to have me wooed. What’s important is that Flipboard offers us a glimpse into something that’s more than a sum of its parts – that in the future, information around us will be increasingly collected in real-time and ranked socially.

In the upcoming posts, I will be attempting to build a prototype that replicates Flipboard’s key functionalities using open source libraries and code snippets found on the web. I think it’ll be a fun and inspiring project that would help us understand better the kind of technology that lies under the hood of this amazing app. Stay tuned!

Extended reading/viewing:

• “Flipping”, zombies-style in Resident Evil :
• “The Inside Story: Flipboard’s Crazy Launch And Its Plan To Save Media”: http://www.businessinsider.com/flipboard-ceo-mike-mccue-2010-7.