There’s no real shortage of news apps available for iPhone, although you may get a different narrative from one to another, pretty much all of them provide you with a similar service. This week we’ve found a news app with a difference though, it’s called Inside.com and it’s aimed at people who want to be hyper specific with the news updates they receive.
To summarise it, imagine Twitter combined with Reddit but curated by actual journalists. Your stream is populated by 300 character snippets with a headline and a photo or two. You can either view all updates, top news or create your own personal feed by selecting which categories you would like to view. These categories aren’t regimented like traditional news sites (Technology, Sport, Global etc) instead they are broken down into much more specific categories, more like hashtags, like (looking at the new topics this minute) “contaminants” “edinburghuniversity” and “eidosmontreal”.
Once you’ve read the snippet, written by someone at Inside.com, you can either like, dislike comment or share the story via social media and email. If you want to find out more you can tap the snippet to be taken through to the original source. This is done through a web view so you can easily navigate back to your stream without having to switch between apps.
As you may have guessed from the name Inside.com, as well as being available for iOS, Blackberry and soon Android, it’s also a web service so if you create an account you can have your own personalised news stream across all of your devices.
Overall I really like the Inside.com app, it looks like it’ll be really handy to stay up to date across a broad selection of topics. I’m sure I’ll still be using the Guardian app for most of my news and Google Alerts for some up to the minute topics but Inside.com will be a really useful addition to these tools I’m sure.