Meeting Notes - 3 June 2014

by **bdahm** Thu Jun 12, 2014 4:53 pm

I asked how many people were here for the first time? Peter decided to drop in and see what it’s all about. Then I asked how many people were there for the last time? That got an ever larger response. I can remember all the names (;>).

Personal Magazines
One of the most popular apps to come along, one that was available early on, and one of the most gorgeous apps for the tablet is FlipBoard. It aggregates topics from a variety of sources including Twitter and displays them in a lovely layout that one can actually page through. You can turn the page agonizingly slow and watch how the content re-scales as you flip the page. Really fascinating! You can choose sources from categories such as News, Business, Tech & Science, Sports, Shopping, Photos & Design, Arts & Culture, Living, Food & Dining, Travel, Style, Music, Books, even Big Ideas and City Guides. In the News category alone there are more than 54 different news sources, most of which you will recognize. You could, indeed, spend your entire on-line day with this app alone. Available from your favorite app store.

https://flipboard.com

There’s another personal magazine in the same mold as FlipBoard called Zite. It has one very nice distinguishing feature. Based on the topics and sources that are presented to you, you can choose to have more of same (thumbs up) or less of same (thumbs down). It will customize itself over time to your wishes. This is, indeed, very helpful because if there is any topic you don’t want to follow in the future, you won’t see it. I actually prefer Zite to FlipBoard and use it almost exclusively.

http://zite.com

The one downer about Zite is it has just been bought by FlipBoard and will be closing down in 6 months as it merges into Flipboard. Here’s a blogpost on the topic from it’s founders.

http://blog.zite.com/2014/03/05/zite-is-flipping-out/

Yahoo Digest
Another good source of news is Google News Digest. It’s a smartphone app that provides one story from a smattering of topics such as World News, Tech, Sports, Business, and Politics. The digests are succinct and provide short, germane quotes. It comes out twice a day and automatically downloads to your smartphone. Available for iOS and Android.

Other News Sources
Chris provided some additional sources for news including Newsy and Winston.

Google Unveils Prototype of Self-Driving Car
Google has actually built a prototype (100 vehicles) of its autonomous driving vehicle. See it for yourself. You will see that the occupants testing it are, for the most part, special needs individuals who might now otherwise have a convenient means of getting around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqSDWoAhvLU

That’s pretty much all the news that was. I’d call that a wrap. See you next week.

-Bill