Last month I started what I hope will be a (somewhat) monthly review of iOS apps that may be of interest to my mom, who (or is it whom) by all means is a novice when it comes to these things. This months review is Flipboard. I’m not really sure how to best describe the app. It’s one part newspaper / magazine, another part social network feed, another part topic aggregator. If there’s something on the internet you want to track and read about, it can find it for you and put the information into a format that’s easy to read, usually with some pleasant pictures to make it easy on the eyes. Last week I brought up the app to a couple of people, one a somewhat gadget junky and another one far from it, and both liked the app. It appeals to many types of users.

You can see from the pictures that it’s a pleasant little app to look at. It’s also pretty smooth to use. The picture on the left is the home screen. The top box includes cover stories, which is an aggregated look at all the topics I follow. After that are smaller boxes for each topic I follow. Tapping on the box brings up a separate page with a story. From there you tap the story to read more or swipe up/down to look at older/newer stories.

You can see the topics I like to read about on the bottom of the first page and the second page. To show that almost anything can be added, I started a search for the word “greece” to see what was available (picture on the right). The list was long and included various newspapers and magazines, some even in Greek. Tapping on the + sign on the right will add the topic to my preferences, resulting in another box.  You can also add Facebook and Twitter account information into the app, which will create separate boxes to track that information. Although, I don’t think you can submit status updates to the account. Flipboard just puts the information into an easily readable format.

The best part… It’s free!

So there you have it.  Enjoy!