Yahoo Updates iPhone App With Cinemagraphs, Read-Later Feature, More
Project “Grand Slam”, Yahoo’s mission to “bring a more coherent look and identity to Yahoo’s pages” in the words of CEO Marissa Mayer, is today flying over one of Yahoo’s flagship properties, the Yahoo iPhone app, where it has traditionally aggregated all of its different content features and provided a window for people to search the web. Today, to coincide with iOS 7, the Yahoo app is being released with a new redesign, incorporating its new logo, as well as a number of new features, from breaking news and read-it-later slinging through to Tumblr integration, that Yahoo hopes will catapult it into becoming a more useful (and more enjoyable) consumer app.
As with much of what Yahoo has been doing of late with its mobile services, a lot of this is about playing catch-up with many of the products that are out there today. Here’s a list and short description of some of the most important changes:
Breaking news: It’s a surprise that Yahoo’s app has been too static up to now to include this content, but it’s good to have it here. Essentially what you get now is a list of stories along with a little note at the top giving you an alert to when new content has been added, not unlike the update at the top of Twitter’s timeline.
Cinemagraphs: This is a hattip to Tumblr and the generally more engaging idea of video and GIFs, with some images now incorporating small movements within them. While right now there doesn’t appear to be any advertising in the app (at least in the beta that I tested), it’s features like that that are essential to have built in there so that they can later get sold out to advertisers at a premium. To go along with the GIFs, integration with Tumblr, which Yahoo purchased earlier this year for $1.1 billion, has now been added in alongside sharing to other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Navigation: You can scroll down to see a list of stories, but when you are in each story, you swipe horizontally to read on. This mimics the gestures in the Weather app and shows how Yahoo is trying to better unify the experience.
For now it looks features like My Saves are only available in the U.S.