Flip Feed

Lately, I've been ignoring my feed reader on my laptop. I use Google Reader, as many of you do, to keep in touch with all y'all* and for the many, many, many baseball sites I follow. But now I only check in on my feed reader on my PC during small breaks while I'm working. Mostly because I've become addicted to my smaller Android devices. My phone and my Kindle Fire. And I now use those for most of my feed reading fun.

*A very lovely Southern woman with great tig ole bitties once told me that the plural to "y'all" is "all y'all". Makes no sense to me, but I learned a long time ago never to argue with breasts.

At first I was using my web browser on each device to access Google Reader and Twitter. That was dumb. Mostly because the web browsers that come standard on those devices suck. I now have Firefox on my phone, and it's great. Syncs to the Firefox browser on my laptop with shared history and bookmarks. It's wonderful. But the standard Android web browsers? Yeah...they suck. Then I downloaded the apps for Google Reader and Twitter on each device. Much better. The Google Reader app on the Kindle Fire is actually a little better than the one available on my phone. If a mobile feed is available, I can tap a truncated post and it opens up the mobile feed in the same app. Going to the next feed item is as simple as swiping. If I want to open up either the mobile or full feed on a truncated post on my phone, it automatically opens up the browser (now Firefox) to the full post. A tad clunky, and maybe there is a way for me to correct that. I dunno.

But I rarely use those apps anymore either. Now I'm all into Flipboard on my phone. It bills itself as your social magazine, and upon setup it basically is just that. But you can also integrate your feed reader, Twitter and other social media like Facebook and Instagram into it. Instagram is particularly cool on Flipboard. On the regular app, on either Android or iOS, there is no way I've seen to "blow up" the pictures so that you can zoom in on some smaller detail. On Flipboard, you simply tap the picture and it opens up for you to play with as you will. Very cool. The integrated Google Reader shows all feeds truncated initially, but you simply tap it to slide open to the full post. Slide back to the feed stream when you are done. You can also tap on the full post to open it up in your web browser if you so desire. Then hit the back button to go right back to Flipboard. It's all integrated very nicely, in my opinion. I haven't really found anything about Flipboard that I don't like yet, in fact.

I'm still learning about it, and there are a few bugs that still need to be worked out with the Android version. It was initially developed for the iPhone and iPad. I forget which one right now, but on either Twitter or Instagram the reply feature isn't working properly. Again...I could just be doing something wrong. I'm still learning.

Anyone else out there flipping out for Flipboard?

UPDATE: Flipboard was in Beta when I signed up for it on my phone. It wasn't available for the Kindle Fire at that point. I just checked and it is available there as well. Did a quick download, signed in and bam...now I'm all set up there as well. Very cool.