Flipboard competitor Material goes live
Flipboard (and Google Currents, et al) competitor Material has gone live in the App Store. From a quick glance, Material look like just another magazine-type newsreader, but Material has tackled one of the biggest annoyances about newsreaders that others haven't: the setup.
With most newsreaders, the first time you launch the app, you need to tell it what types of news you are interested in and from what sources you like to get your news from. Material skips that mundane setup phase altogether by bringing you the content you want to read straight away. It does this by scanning your Facebook and Twitter feeds and sees the types of articles you like to read and the people you are following and adjusts your preferences accordingly.
Of course, Material also does allow you to custom configure your news sources, but I suspect that many of its users (who are active on social media anyway) will find the app fine to use with its preselected sources based on your social media footprint.
Material is a free download.
