Flip Home Page on Safari Mobile.
We’re all reading news on the web. Instead of clipping an ad out to share with someone, we just send over a link. I think though there isn’t a great analog for browsing through a paper or magazine. Not only does this replicate reading a physical medium better, but it also allows you to scan stories for more information than just the headline.
Google has given the world a great analog for reading the paper in the form of Fast Flop. Available over at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com the site looks like a gallery of news pages. Click on this and you get a closer look at that page, and navigation to flip through the various “pages” in the category you have selected. The site simply shows you a snap shot of the page, but you can’t read more without clicking through to the original site. This essentially makes Fast Flip a new UI for Google News, but that’s needed.
Though the full sized client is nice enough, what really caught my attention is the mobile version. I tried this out using Safari Mobile, and the integration of touch gestures is flawless. Allowing you to read through the first part of a story without clicking through just works better when you are working with limited connectivity. I would like to know how it works on a device without a large screen and touch capability. For Safari, it was perfect.
I don’t know where Google is going with this feature. I assume that it is going to center heavily in a redesign of Google News, however as I use Google Reader for most of my browsing, it would be a great upgrade to Reader’s interface. For now Fast Flip is under the umbrella of Labs. This is one those things that is likely a novelty, but it is fun.
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