“nu” for iPhone is a new application that is built for mainly news, photos, and social content. It has a very smooth user interface, and is closely mimicked after the revolutionary Flipboard iPad application that has many of the same functions. While Flipboard blows away all competition with its user interface, nu simply implements its features well, and is on the right track to becoming a very popular and useful app.
When you first use nu, it shows you a visually pleasing grid of different news options for you to look through. It is supposed to be laid out somewhat like rows of magazines. The first thing you’ll notice about this app is that for some reason, the app only supports landscape mode. While it certainly gives you a better layout, and is probably preferred by many users, it is a little strange that this is your only option. Additionally, when tapping on news sources, including when you login to your Facebook profile, status updates and news articles are shown full screen and require you to swipe through them one by one. While this can be nice to let you easily read through them, it is also a bit cumbersome, and can be a bit annoying when you want to go back and forth between articles that are not close together. Particularly with Facebook, having each persons status as a full page that you have to swipe past gets very annoying very quickly.
The second thing that you notice when perusing the app is that the thumbnail images of the news sources are a bit squeezed, and don’t seem to be displayed properly. This is something that should be relatively easy to fix, and would be something that would make the app much better looking. Past these few minor cosmetic details, the app is actually very well laid out, and a pleasure to use. It has many different news sources that give you news on mainly on Tech, Health, Business, and Sports with a few options for Top Headlines. You can add additional sources, but there really aren’t a ton of different sources right now. I’m sure this will change, but their description on the app is that it has “almost every popular news website” which right now, isn’t true. It mainly takes from AP News, with a few other sources as well.
There are some features of this app that are really unique and really make it a pleasure to use. One is a feature called MyMagazine (requires Facebook login) which allows you to pick and choose news articles from all the different news sources, and click a plus symbol to put them in your magazine. Then later, you can go directly there, and see all the articles that peeked your interest and you can read them further. Another couple of features that are unique is the Trivia Time and Quick Poll areas. When you go into these two places, it just gives you quick trivia questions, and also quick polls that reveal how other people have voted once you choose an answer. These are very entertaining, and are pretty unique just to this app.
Overall, this app has a lot of potential, and its first implementation boasts an impressive user interface. It’s something I will definitely keep on my phone in hopes the developer pops out a couple of good initial updates. It also has Twitter and Instagram implementation that some people will also find useful, and it has the ability to share all news articles socially through all of a large variety of social avenues. This app is a very positive step towards more interactive and beautiful social news apps on the iPhone, and with work, could possibly reach the level of Flipboard!