If you’ve ever pulled up a news website only to be frustrated by all the uninteresting articles you have to wade through in order to find the topics and issues you’re interested in — or if you’ve ever wished there were a single site that pulled all your varied interests together in one place, SkyGrid could be your new best friend.
SkyGrid works similar to Twitter, in that you can select different interests, or channels of information, to follow. The app will then continually push news for these categories or topics to your phone so you can always stay up-to-date on whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you are. Hit the jump and I’ll show you how it works.
Featured News and the Basics
Upon initial start-up, you’ll see a three-by-three grid of featured news topics. These are topics that SkyGrid deems hot trends at the moment and is suggesting that you follow. The small icons in the top righthand corner of each topic snapshot indicates which category it belongs to — for example, Politics, Entertainment, Science, Movies, Business and so on. You can return to this grid any time within the app by clicking on the grid icon in the top lefthand corner of the screen.
Clicking on any one of the featured topics will take you to a list of brief headlines for relevant stories.
Clicking on any one of the featured topics will take you to a list of brief headlines for relevant stories, and you’re given the option to click “Follow” for that topic at the top of the screen. Below and to the left of each headline SkyGrid lists the sources of the articles — everything from The New York Times and CNN to MTV, Conde Nast Traveler, IMDB.com and TMZ.
If you then click on any one of the news articles in the list, SkyGrid presents you with an image and the very beginning of the article (the first sentence or two) as well as a “View Full Article” button and options to share the information via Twitter, Facebook or email. Conveniently, SkyGrid displays both the article’s lead and the full article within the app so that you don’t have to constantly jump back and forth between SkyGrid and Safari.
SkyGrid presents the very beginning of the article, as well as a “View Full Article” button.
Creating Your Own Newsfeed
The first time you use SkyGrid, the app will walk you through the process of choosing your interests from its long list of categories (which, by the way, are conveniently color-coded). During subsequent uses of the app, however, simply select the Categories tab located at the bottom of the screen in order to call up the list of subjects and add to your interests.
Select the Categories tab located at the bottom of every screen to recall the list of subjects.
If you have a very specific interest (for example, “Manchester United” rather than just “football” or “soccer”), or if you just can’t find what you’re looking for among SkyGrid’s categories, click on the Search tab at the bottom of the screen. Now you can type in your interest to call up a list of the latest news stories covering that topic (if you’re familiar with Google Alerts, the concepts will seem similar). At the top of your search results, you’ll see a Follow button that enables you to add this new interest to your list.
Can't find what you're looking for? Click on the Search button to find a specific interest.
Accessing Your Newsfeed
Clicking on the “Following” star on the center tab at the bottom of the screen will call up all the interests you’ve selected to follow, and interests with updated information are indicated with Apple’s usual blue dot. Tap on any one of these interests to be shown the latest headlines for that topic.
Interests with updated information are indicated with Apple’s usual blue dot.
Your list can easily be edited by clicking on Edit in the top righthand corner of the screen. Use this function to delete interests or re-order them in any way you like.
Below your list of selected interests, SkyGrid also presents a plus sign, which allows you to quickly add a new interest, as well as additional suggestions for topics to follow, such as the “Top 10 Topics” and “Top 10 Sources.” Add any of these to your interests by clicking the Follow button just to the right of each one.
Add interests by clicking the Follow button just to the right.
And finally, the Share App tab in the bottom right of the screen allows you to email information on the SkyGrid app to any and all contacts whose email addresses are listed in your phone, making it easy to share the good news about SkyGrid with your other info-absorbing friends and acquaintances.
Conclusion
For an app whose objective is to take an overwhelming amount of information on the worldwide web and pare it down for users, it does a good job of remaining simple in both concept and execution.
The graphics are not stunning, but decent. And many of the article snippets have image resolution issues (which for some reason are usually corrected after you click through to the full article). Also, be forewarned: you will periodically encounter horizontal ads at the bottom of the screen, which some users might find distracting or annoying.
Ultimately, I believe SkyGrid could be an invaluable tool for users who are info-holics, or for individuals such as business owners, journalists, public relations professionals, bloggers and really any other kind of professional whose livelihood depends on his or her ability to remain 100 percent up-to-date on a specific industry, product or other issue.