Flipboard, the app that allows you to read content shared on Twitter and Facebook in a magazine-like interface for iPad, announced a few minutes ago an exclusive partnership with eight publishers to bring “the beauty of print and the power of the web” together in an dedicated Flipboard section, right into the iPad app.
What this means is fairly simple: these publishers, which include the names of All Things Digital, Uncrate and SFGate, will offer a web interface specifically formatted for Flipboard. Flipboard will still grab an excerpt of articles coming from these sources, but the web view will be different and exclusive. Flipboard will no longer open the standard website when tapping on the “Read More” button, it’ll open the new “beautiful” interface these publishers have created for the iPad app.
The result is quite pleasant and surely better than a desktop web view squeezed into the iPad.
Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO writes:
Go ahead and add these publishers to your table of contents. Try flipping through some of the articles they are sharing. Check out the elegant typography, clean layouts and terrific imagery.
Please keep in mind though that this is still a test so you will likely see formatting bugs here and there which will get better over time.
The feature, called “Flipboard Pages”, is already live in the app. All you have to do is add a new section and pick one of the associated publishers (which are featured in “This week’s picks”) to check out the new interface. Some of these publishers, like Uncrate, really did a terrific work in delivering an elegant, minimal and polished Flipboard-exclusive interface.
We look forward to seeing what the Flipboard team has in store for the future.
