Alltop For iPad Is Best Avoided

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When it's not telling you about spline reticulation, Alltop for iPad annoys you with error messages

Alltop, you may already know, is a web news aggregator from serial lame-e-preneur Guy Kawasaki. Now, this questionably-useful service has been ported to the iPad as an app. And it’s even worse.

Alltop for iPad is a shonky mess, a native front end thinly papered over a web browser. On the left is a list of categories. Pick one and the screen fills with various lists culled from the RSS feeds of relevant sites. Tap a headline and a summary pops over. Tap this and the story opens in a browser window in a rather odd and sparse web view.

You can share these articles via e-mail, Twitter (not using iOS’ built-in Twitter, though) and Facebook. There is no support for Instapaper or any other read-later services, which seems odd as this is an app designed for finding things to read.

The app is supposedly ad-supported, too, although I wasn’t served any. There is no paid upgrade to get rid of them, either.

But worst of all, every time you switch to a view that requires a reload of info, a bezel pops up to say “reticulating splines.” As my grandpappy used to say, “WTF?”

To compare, I popped over to the Alltop website, which looks great on the iPad. Tapping a headline gives you a popover summary. Tapping again opens the original page, and you can of course use the Instapaper bookmarklet to read stories later.

The Alltop app, then, seems to be an app that is actually worse thsan the website it aims to replace. Avoid.

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