newscover Is A Preference-Aware Virtual Newspaper For Android
The likes of Flipboard, Google Currents, Pulse and a few other feature-filled news readers surely have their fair share of fans across both Android and iOS. Having said that, if you look past the big players, there are certain emerging candidates that seem to have what it takes to impress the masses, one of them being newscover – a free and personalized news aggregator for Android that keeps you updated about the latest and past stories from the world of sports, technology, business, style and current affairs in a beautifully crafted newspaper-like interface. newscover happens to be one of the few apps of its kind that let you head back to a date of choice to check out all the significant events that made the headlines for that particular day. Apart from that, the app sports various gesture-based controls to let you sift through news pages, choose the maximum number of news headlines you wish to see on your screen, and play around with various bookmarking and sharing tools you’d expect from a news reader app.
newscover claims to start smartly learning about your reading preferences after you’ve spent just five seconds with the app. Then as you keep discovering more and more stories, the app tries to further gauge your reading habits, and curates your personalized news page accordingly. As of now, newscover is available in English and Spanish. A good thing is that you aren’t required to register or log in to the app to start reading news. However, reregistration enables you to access your personalized newscover content on any device you own. Furthermore, affiliating the app with your Facebook and/or Twitter account(s) will help newscover learn even better about your reading preferences and favorite topics.
Unfortunately, the app offers users no control over the sources newscover fetches all its stories from. Instead, it utilizes the expansive news repository of more than a thousand different sources to present you with the best stories pertaining to all the supported categories. It also sports a native search feature to help you find news content relevant to your keywords. Using the pinch-to-zoom gesture, you can decide how many news stories the app’s home screen should show. It’s a choice between one, three or a maximum of six stories per page. You can use the sideways swiping gesture to flip through pages just as you would do with a real newspaper.
The sliding sidebar on the left reveals the quick navigation options for accessing stories falling under a specific category supported by newscover. It is also from this screen that you can access bookmarked stories, your personal newscover profile, and the app’s settings screen. newscover caches all the recently opened stories and headlines, so that you can access them even when you have no internet connection.
From the app’s homescreen, you can tap the date button at the top-right to fly back to another date in time in order to check out all the featured news content of that particular day. Since newscover is relatively fresh to the scene, one can expect the app’s archive section to fill up nicely with the passage of time. For any chosen day, you can switch between recent and popular stories. Long-pressing a headline tells the app that you’re ‘interested’ in that particular topic. From the same menu, you can bookmark the story, find other relevant news, and share the news with your buddies.
The same actions are also accessible through a dedicated bar at the bottom of the story’s screen itself, which also lets you go through the entire story through an uncluttered native news reader interface.
All in all, newscover seems pretty polished and feature-rich for an app just making its debut in the Play Store. True, it isn’t yet entirely complete in essence, but we expect the developers to improve their product even further with all the customizations and features that we have come to expect in a quality mobile news reader.
Download newscover For Android
