Staying connected, something we all like to do these days, means reading e-mails everywhere, checking Facebook every hour, and also being on top of the latest news. Be it the big things happening in our area, some exciting Hollywood news or the release of a major update to our favorite app, we like to know about things when they happen.
There are some pretty attractive, fun and personalized ways to read news on your iPad. However, many news apps, even the very best ones, tend to overwhelm me. Many of them are comprised of endless squares that I need to customize in order to not get immediately lost. Evri is a news reader for the iPadwhich makes it all a bit more organized. While not being very customizable, it makes it easy to zoom in directly on your favorite topics and still be able to broaden your interests whenever you feel like it.
Browsing, Reading & Sharing
Evri turns news, no matter what they are, into candy. The app is very well designed, and everything you look at just beckons you to read it. When you first load the app, you’ll see a top bar with some topics you can choose from (News, US & World, Entertainment, Sports, Business and Technology). Tapping any of these will show you a list of hot sub-topics on the left and some hot news on the main screen.
When you focus on one sub-topic, you get a glimpse of the very top news, a list of featured articles and some related topics. For each and every topic you browse, no matter how broad or how specific, there’s a “Follow” button. Tapping it will add the topic to your Now Following list, and you’ll be able to read everything under it easily as it’s published.
You can easily access your Now Following list from this notice or from the main app page. From there you can also delete topics you are not longer interested in.
Evri gathers news items from all over the Web. When browsing a topic, you’ll get a preview (or sometimes the full article, if it’s short) of all the hot stories from different sources. There are several things you can do with these:
- “Read” opens the full original article in the app’s internal browser.
- “Save” lets you save this article for later using Read It Later or Instapaper (requires login).
- “Share” allows you to share this piece of news with friends via Facebook & Twitter (requires login) or via e-mail. You can also use this button to open the article in Safari.
Finding & Learning
You might not be very interested in the somewhat limited topics Evri provides for quick browsing. But don’t worry, Evri provides a quick, live search for topics. No matter what page you’re on, tap the search box and start typing. Evri will immediately start loading a list of topics which might be a match for your word. It will not limit by broad topics, so a search for “Horse”, for example, yields the animal, a military person, a plant, a film and so on.
When you’ve found your specific topic, simply tap on it and you’ll be taken to a page dedicated to everything that has to do with this topic. The connection can be somewhat loose, especially if your topic is a bit broad.
At any point when browsing, you can tap the “Info” icon to learn more about whatever it is you’re reading about. Evri provides an excerpt from Wikipedia with some important information, and a list of related topics, which can be very related or just somewhat related (George Clooney and Coffee?).
Another convenient thing you can do is go through your entire browsing history. On the top topics bar, scroll all the way to the right and look for the “History” tab. Here you’ll find a list, complete with times of the day, of all the topics you’ve browsed today, in the past week and in the past month. If you were browsing something really interesting and forgot to follow it, you can use the history to find it again.
Bottom Line
All in all, Evri provides a fun news-reading experience which you can use to find a specific news item, or to dive into the world of news and explore it deeply by jumping from link to link. The way Evri works, you’ll always get a list of related stories or related links, so you can pretty much go on browsing and reading news all day long.
I do wish they’d add some more ways to customize it, such as letting the user choose which topics appear on the left-side list, but even as it is, Evri is a polished iPad app and it helps you find your way through the news, instead of getting you lost.
Do you know of some more good news apps? What did you think of Evri? Share in the comments!
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