Wednesday, January 26, 2011

My iPad killer app for wargames


Untill this day I used my iPad for all the usual things regarding wargames. Browsing, rulebooks, uniform guides, movies and I even tried to create maps and update my blog. This is defenitely handy and useful especially for all the pdf rulebooks and supplements we use from TooFatLardies. 
But not really, really spectacular so far.

Until today.

I discovered that my favorite app Flipboard has the ability to create magazines from folders in Google Reader. So what, you think.
Well because of this I now have the best looking wargames magazine on my iPad with content from blogs and interesting wargaming related websites I choose. It updates itself and you can interact with the content in many ways. 
This is like getting a personal Wargames Illustrated every day, but better.


For those of you who don't know Flipboard, this is an superb application that turns info of the internet into a personalized  magazine. It also has tons of social media features to twitter, email, facebook, comment etc but you can check that yourself  here
If you have an iPad, this is a free app you should have. Certainly now.

Will tell you how to do this after the pictures break:












Flipping the pages..





For this to work you need to have your subscriptions (feeds) in Google reader. I did not find a way that
works with other RSS programs at this date. If you don't use Blogger or Google reader you can import your subscriptions following this instructions: import
If you have them available configuring Flipboard is really simple.
Navigate to the Contents section again and press Add a Section. Once there, tap on the Google Reader item. You will be prompted for your Google account credentials.

Once you have signed in, a new content square will be added called Google Reader. Tap this square and it will bring you into the Google Reader main view. From here, you can browse all of the latest news from the RSS feeds you subscribe to in Google Reader by simply flipping through it.

To get only your wargaming content (assuming you have other)  tap on the Google Reader text in the Flipboard menu bar. Now go to subscriptions and pick the folder you use for wargaming feeds . It now generates your new magazine and takes you to that section. Now tap the + sign on the left to save your magazine as a section.
Done.
It probably is quicker to do than to read this.

Note for Google Blogger users. You will have a folder Blogs I am following in Google Reader. This folder for unknown reasons did not work for me. I created a new folder and put all my subscriptions (including blogger ones) in there. All subscriptions will go to that folder in the future...





For me no more clicking through websites using favorites or struggling with unusable RSS readers to stay on top of the wargaming news. I have my own beautiful wargames magazine now!

Now what is you killer app?















3 comments:

  1. What a great idea - I've been playing around with using the iPad for gaming (rules, damage tracking for ships) but have never heard of flipboard.

    My killer is is Numbers - I build status sheets for fleet games in excel (Trafalgar, for example) - push it over to the iPad and open via Numbers and it works great

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  2. Killer apps? iBooks for the pile of rules PDFs ;)

    And the first person to write something like Battle Chronicler for the iPad will have my undying admiration. And money ;)

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