Let Your News Work For You With inkWire - Plus A Chance To Win A Copy!

I find that many news apps are very slow to load at the initial start up. InkWire, however, loaded immediately and I was ready to go. The interface and design are reminiscent of the Pulse news app; a black background with glowing blue accents. It’s very pleasing to the eye.

The home screen greets you with a page of icons pertaining to each main news genre (e.g. “world,” “technology,” “sports”). To rearrange these icons to better suit your tastes, you treat them just like the apps on your iDevice: press and hold until they shake, then move around to your liking. You may also delete any genre you choose. For example, I deleted “sports” right away. I honestly do not know my LeBron from my Crosby.

Now, the main purpose of this app is personalization. To get started, I played around with the three blue icons on the bottom of the screen. Here, there are options to search, personalize publishers and tags, and link to your social media feeds.

What’s a good news app without social media integration? Once linked, you can share the news you find with your Facebook and Twitter friends. This also allows you to view any comments your friends have made on the news you have posted. Although this is a neat way to interact with the news, I would also like to view news from these feeds, regardless of where they came from. That would make my personalized news experience that much better.

For an even more customized experience, you can rate certain tags and news publishers. Just tell the app if you want to hear more about a certain topic/tag, hear less, or ignore it altogether. The same customization can be applied to publishers. You can also create your own tags and sections.

Not only can your entire news experience be manually personalized, but the app will also automatically update your preferences as you read more articles. Even the content that is not optimized for mobile viewing is automatically converted for you.

Viewing the articles in full screen is a plus, and with the tap of a finger, you have many options at your disposal. At any time, you may adjust the font size, view related articles, give feedback for the current article, and of course share the good news with your friends or another application. The app even has a “followed” news section where you may store favorite articles that you find useful.

Although it’s getting there, it hasn’t fully surpassed the usability of some of the other news apps out there, so I am leery of the pricetag. However, the app has several creative features and the developers are working hard to bring you more! If not having to sift through news to find what you’re really interested in sounds good, give the app a try! I’ll be keeping it around and I anticipate the updates.

Giveaway: We have teamed up with inkWire and have five copies to give to some lucky readers. For a chance to win a copy, simply leave a comment on this post by Sunday, June 21 at 5 p.m. PST. We’ll pick the winners randomly. Good luck!