For little over one year now, I have been working intermittently with the friendly folks in Italy on the MacTrast Flipboard relationship. Sure, we are not as big as The New York Times or the Associated Press, but we think very highly of ourselves with a steady stream of international Apple enthusiast fans visiting the site on a daily basis.
Our first win happened in mid-2012, when I was able to successfully convince the Flipboard team to add the MacTrast RSS feed to the suggested “Tech and Science” section both in Europe and the US. Go ahead, I’ll wait for you to find us. Just tap the red ribbon in the top right corner of the app, scroll to Tech and Science, then find us, in proper alpha order.
After celebrating our inclusion in the suggested section, our next victory was receiving our own Flipboard landing page. You can visit it directly – http://flpbd.it/mactrast – and it updates with each new post as it his the web.
Finally, we are pleased to announce, last week we were included in the Flipboard Pages Program, which was a year in the making. Several correspondences back and forth, providing necessary information, slight arm twisting, and for what? Now you can actually flip the MacTrast RSS feed just like a magazine, just the way Flipboard intended it. Previously, as with most feeds, Flipboard simply pulls in the feed and scrolls it like a webpage. However, selected feeds are modified by Flipboard to actually, well, flip!
It may not seem like a big accomplishment to the casual observer, but we have actually tried investing in a mobile website plugin that made MacTrast appear this way through a browser, which would also behave like a flip-style browser within Flipboard too. Because this plug in left a lot to be desired, we ditched it a month back. It only has a life span of a few weeks anyway. Now that we are in the Pages Program, the behavior is determined by Flipboard and it is seamlessly excellent.
As an avid Flipboard fan I spend about 90% of my iPad time flipping pages through the app. I cannot, we, the team, cannot be more excited to be honored by Flipboard in this way! Look out world, here we come!
Did any of you notice the change? Who follows us on Flipboard? Who is just as excited as we are over this? Meet us in the comments below!