Taptu has updated its popular Android app to version 1.5 with a handful of new features that will make users old and new pretty happy. Having fully supported Honeycomb since version 1.4, now they take the UI up a couple notches and offer some pretty slick enhancements. To start with, you can now enlarge the section holding the stream you're currently reading, giving you a better view of things you might want to click and explore further. You also have the ability to color code the stream headers, to tell at a glance which is which. Both sound subtle, but in practice they really are nice features -- the folks have done their homework.
If a nicer UI isn't enough, the search function has been enhanced. When you search a keyword, both the topics and content are searched to offer the articles that may have been missed otherwise. Says Taptu CEO Mitch Lazar:
Our promise has always been to ensure that no matter what you're searching for, we’ve got a stream for it. We wanted to give Taptu fans even more ways to discover new content in our app. We wanted to bring even more serendipity to what the app can offer, aside of course, from giving them the ability to customize the app to get exactly the content they want.
A couple days with the press preview tells me they have succeeded here as well. Of course there's other enhancements as well. Back-end URL shortening is available from within the app, the phone version now shows larger images, scrolling over to the right auto-refreshes the current stream, and the whole app benefits from new performance and speed improvements. In this bloggers opinion, they've outdone themselves with version 1.5. Taptu is still free, and runs on Android 2.1 and higher devices. You can find the full press release, a couple more screenshots, and the download link after the break.
Social News Reader Taptu Launches Version 1.5 of Android App with Supercharged Search, a Sharp New Interface and Related Stories
Free social newsreader app lets customer discover more content and resize and color code streams on Android phones and tablets
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND & DENVER— June 8, 2011 — Today Taptu, a social media and mobile technology company, is announcing the release of Taptu 1.5 for Android, the latest version of its free social news reader app for Android phones and tablets. Version 1.5 supercharges search, making it easy to discover even more content to read, while also adding the ability to customize the look and feel of the app on any Android device.
Taptu lets customers find all the news they really want to read. The search function now scans both for the topic of a stream and for keywords within streams to provide even more news to consume. Because a search engine powers Taptu, it does not depend solely on RSS and social media feeds like competitors. This gives customers the chance to search for streams by topic, not just a specific Website or blog name.
For example, customers searching for ‘LeBron James’ most probably will get no streams that are exact match for the basketball player. Now Taptu will display suggested streams that include Taptu’s curated Basketball and Miami Heat streams as well as The Miami Herald’s Miami Heat blog and the Bleacher Report, since they both provide wide coverage of news related to James.
“Our promise has always been to ensure that no matter what you're searching for, we’ve got a stream for it. We wanted to give Taptu fans even more ways to discover new content in our app. We wanted to bring even more serendipity to what the app can offer, aside of course, from giving them the ability to customize the app to get exactly the content they want," said Mitch Lazar, CEO of Taptu.
Taptu is already known for the serious level of customization it gives customers, including letting anyone ‘DJ the News’ by mixing stories from different interests into their own streams. By popular demand Taptu 1.5 now brings even more customization to its Android app. Resize streams to make them larger or smaller and color code them to get organized. Additional stream settings let customers hide photos or to display different sized images. Article pages have also been given a layout makeover, delivering full-sized photos and bigger headlines. Individual streams can be quickly refreshed nows by scrolling them to the right.
Taptu 1.5 adds related article discovery to the Android app, which has quickly become one of the most popular features on Taptu for iPad. While reading a popular story on Android, customers are given a list of related stories from a similar source or similar topic.
Download Taptu now: https://market.android.com/
About Taptu:
Founded in 2006, Taptu is an award-winning social media and mobile technology company based in Cambridge, England and Denver, Colorado. We build innovative platforms, tools and applications that enable highly personalized creation, curation, recommendation, search, discovery, management, consumption and sharing of content across all personal screen-based devices. Wapedia, Taptu’s popular mobile Wikipedia with over 1 million downloads, is also available for download at the Apple App Store.
See www.taptu.com for more information.
