In this age of technology, we have constant access to vast amount of information. It becomes hard to differ between what is apropos of your concerns and what is not. You’ve got to keep up with the news at every instant and that can be a reasonably arduous task. Stories does not wait for you to catch an eye upon. It becomes a challenge to get hold of the news about your preferred subject matters.
Fortunately enough, there are several apps in Windows 10 Store to keep you updated with latest shifts and swings about the topic that matters to you. These apps can be of a solitary news network or it can be a news hub that brings together information from diverse sources.
Today, we are going to review Newsflow, a news reader app for Windows 10 which brings all the news of your favorite websites in one place, so you don’t have to spend time on web browsing any more. This app is built using UWP standards which means it is available on Windows 10 Mobile and your other devices as well. Read on to know more about what this app offers.
Introduction
Newsflow is a standalone feed synchronization engine to feed your demand for a simple yet beautifully designed news reader application. It is quite uncommon to find a news reader app with a clean and responsive user interface, even on platforms like Android or iPhone. Newsflow justifiably fulfills this need for a winsome and polished news reader. It firmly follows the Windows 10 UWP guidelines and delivers a consistent and straightforward user experience.
It downloads news from RSS feeds directly to your device and stores them locally, so you’ll be able to read them at any later point of time. Currently, the app is available for only English and Russian languages with an intent to translate it to other languages as well. Improving on the general user experience, it is updated quite often with various bug fixes and performance improvements. Adding to the benefit of a great UI, the app offers a tons of features to elevate the news reading experience.
Design
Newsflow offers a distinctive and friendly user interface with an easy understanding of usage and the layout. It is so tightly bound across all Universal Windows Platform standards that it almost feels like an in-built app for Windows 10. Fluid navigation adds to the elegant interface to deliver a smooth news reading experience.
It also provides support for live tile which you can pin to your Start screen and take a quick look at what’s brewing in your favorite news sector. You get a toast notification whenever there is something new on the websites that you’ve added to your news sources. Keeping in coherence to the platform standards, it also offers a dark mode option which people are specifically enthusiastic about. You can easily configure application settings using toggle buttons for each functionality.
Features
Truth be told, a graceful design alone cannot attract users in masses. You need to stuff your app with the features that gives you a strong foothold over the targeted user base. Newsflow does this task superbly. You’ll find a lot of features that a newsreader app can put forward. Below is the brief feature run-through for this app:
Offline News Storage
Newsflow makes it possible for you to store the news offline so that you can take a peek afterwards per your convenience. You can add any article to the list of deferred reading which you wish to read later. These stories will be saved to your reading list which you can access offline as well.
You can also add the stories of your interest to favorites so that you can quickly access it whenever you wish to read it again.
Beautiful Web Content Formatting
Newsflow is not just another app with unnecessary clutter which interferes with your reading experience. It has its own web content formatting which puts forth the useful content and eliminates the advertisements and other oddments. In a particular article, headings and title formats are retained and HTML formatting is also preserved without jumbling up the content. Relevant tags are shown on the top layer which helps identifying the content category easily. Apart from this, you can also calibrate the font size of articles as per your comfort.
Just like Microsoft Edge browser’s reading view, this app features an extended readability mode which removes the unnecessary formatting and delivers a quick and pristine reading experience. You can also view all the images pertaining to an article in a distraction free mode and save it in your local storage.
OPML Support
OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines which allows you to share the sources you have collected in Newsflow with other reading apps. You can easily export or import OPML files with a single click of your mouse. With this functionality, you can easily import your feed from other sources like Feedly.
Apart from this, Newsflow also renders RSS, ATOM and RDF support.
Other notable features include:
- Receive notifications about every new article on the websites that you have added.
- Share any article or news with your friends.
- Browse newslines grouped by keywords.
- Pin live tile to the Start screen for mainstream news, categories, feeds, tags, favorites and read later sections.
- Change portrait or landscape orientations.
- Automatic synchronization between devices.
- Back and restore your Newsflow settings across various Windows 10 devices where Newsflow is already installed.
Final Thoughts
Even so, Newsflow provides a tonne of features with a minimalist and simple design, it can improve more on adding up more to its feature bucket. Ability to mark articles as read, adding video support, adding support for swipe gestures to make it more touch friendly are just a few of suggestions that can make it the best in the class app.
You can submit your own recommendations(new features, support functionality etc.) to the app developer here on AppStretch. Also, you can contact the developer using Contact Us settings page as shown below.
The way I see it, you won’t be able to find a better app for news reading in Windows Store. So if you want to check the app out, you can download it from Microsoft Store here.
