Flowboard
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FlowVella: The presentation app formerly known as Flowboard
What's the difference between Flowboard and Flipboard? If you're the creators of Flowboard - a presentation creation app -apparently the app name isn't different enough from Flipboard, the story aggregation app. A trademark court found Flowboard to be just a wee bit too close to the name of Flipboard, so the former is now being rebranded as FlowVella. Let's hope they don't get into a trademark dispute with the makers of Nutella... There's more news from the FlowVella front as part of the rebranding. The company is launching an App Builder for packaging your Flows as iPad apps - that will cost you as little as US$99/month per app. The apps are also getting new pricing to go along with the new name. The iPad version of FlowVella is now available for free, while the Mac version - formerly available for $19.99 - is now only $4.99. Should FlowVella become your presentation go-to tool, there are optional premium subscriptions available.
Flowboard is a great way to create and share content via your iPad
So much for the 'can't create content on your iPad' naysayers. Flowboard is a well thought out, free app that lets you create presentations with text, video, or graphics. I could see this being very useful for teachers, artists, photographers, people in PR and students. You can add videos, PDF files, cloud content, and even search Google Images online, or connect to SkyDrive, Dropbox, and Instagram for content. The app is template driven, and there are many professional-looking templates to get you started. Each template can be modified to taste. All your drafts can be saved to the app's own cloud servers, and anything you create can be shared via the web, Facebook, Twitter or Email. %Gallery-195013% Using the app is generally intuitive, but a look at the built-in help documentation got me up to speed. It's a powerful app, but it has its own GUI and design language. Once you get used to it, content creation is fast and a pleasure. There are little touches that I like. A person viewing a photo gallery can pinch and zoom a photo. Changing content is as easy tapping and dragging, and changes are saved to the cloud automatically. Flowboard requires a sign in to get a free account. There is a premium in-app purchase of US$4.99 monthly that gets you more online storage, up to a monthly quota of 1 GB. The free version gives you 250 MB of space on the Flowboard servers. Flowboard is a very elegant app, that many people will find multiple uses for. Yes, PowerPoint and Keynote can accomplish some of the same things, but Flowboard has some attractive presentation tools and sharing is dead simple. Most people can get by with the free version. You can get more info at the Flowboard website, or just download the app and give it a try. Flowboard requires an iPad running iOS 6 or later. Flowboard is a really worthwhile app and if you have a need for what it does, give it a try.
