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Livestand from Yahoo! adds a slick magazine for iPad
Livestand was released for iPad today and I have to say it is pretty impressive. The free app strives to provide you with a personalized magazine drawn from Yahoo! and other content sources like Scientific American, Consumer Reports News, Wired, Forbes, and Parenting. The onscreen presentation is very strong, with bold graphics and a very nice design sense. Weather is local, and the app automatically finds your location. The app supports profiles, and up to 4 users can access their own mix of news on the app. To start up from scratch, the app would like your Yahoo! ID, or your Facebook login to help seed the app with your interests. You can skip this if you want to, and just tell the app what kind of content you like. News seems to be constantly updated, and that includes stock feeds and Twitter updates. In the short time I used it, I didn't see any evidence that the app was learning from my content preferences, but the mix of news is good. The layout is very attractive, but you have to take some time getting used to navigation. If you are used to competitors like Flipboard, Zite or Pulse News Reader, Livestand is a very different animal. After some time, you'll know what does what, and the difference between swiping to the right or down. For a just released app, Livestand is quite impressive. I'm not ready to give up Zite, but Yahoo! has created an interesting and worthwhile free competitor. I'd like to see an iPhone version, but making an equally compelling display on a small screen will be a challenge. If you are a news and information junkie, Livestand is worth a download and a tryout today. Let us know what you think. Here are some screen grabs: %Gallery-138257%
Yahoo! announces Livestand for iPad, available first half 2011
If you've been following TUAW's reports about The Daily, you're aware that many of the TUAW bloggers are so fed up with the buggy, crashing newspaper app that they've removed it from their iPads while the app is still free. For me, the crashes and slow loading weren't as much of an irritant as the lack of customizable and local content. I just don't want to pay for horoscopes, fashion news and entertainment gossip that I can't turn off, and the fact that I can't read any local news on the app killed it for me. Yahoo! has apparently been listening, as the struggling internet giant has announced -- but hasn't shipped -- its solution to the problem that is The Daily. It has announced Livestand for iPad, a customizable news app that will be available "in the first half of 2011." There's no word on whether Yahoo! plans to offer the app for free or, as in the case of The Daily, it will be using subscriptions to refill its coffers. Yahoo! wants to capitalize on the huge volume of content that it has available from multiple publishers, the billions of photos available from Flickr and the many advertising agreements it already has in place. The company says that Livestand will be a digital newsstand that is "continuously programmed by a person's interests and contexts." Some of the screenshots (obviously mockups since the app isn't yet available) show local content boxes with top stories, weather and more, all wrapped in a very visual package that is reminiscent of the Flipboard content page. That makes me wonder if it might not just be a better, and more timely, solution to just load Flipboard with RSS feeds of local news from Yahoo! That solution would also make it less likely for me to have to put up with ads that are "data-rich, actionable, even location aware." I'll let you know how my Yahoo! feeds + Flipboard = Local Newspaper experiment works. Perhaps I'll get my own version of Livestand for iPad well before July rolls around. [via MacStories]
