MixTab Brings Flipboard Style News Discovery to the Mac [Review]
By on August 17th, 2011

I’ve mentioned before that blogging can sometimes mean reading a lot of news. However, it’s always possible that you will miss a big story because you weren’t looking in the right place. That’s why I think it’s important to have more than one path to news. While my primary sources are always RSS feeds and direct press releases, I often find interesting topics for posts in other places.

One such place is MixTab, an app that was ported from iOS to the Mac. MixTab reminds me a lot of Flipboard, the extremely popular iPad app that lets you see news feeds, Twitter, and Facebook in a magazine style presentation. However, what makes MixTab pretty special is that it includes user generated tabs of news.

mixtab-1.png

The user experience of MixTab is pretty nice. It has a nice looking interface with a few customization options. It gives you the option to control which tabs you subscribe to, and even create some of your own. It also supports the full screen mode introduced in OS X Lion, which is a nice touch.

The one real downside I see to the current revision of the MixTab interface is the way it handles full screen mode. While it will become an independent desktop like other apps, it doesn’t scale the content up. Instead, it simply makes the background behind the content bigger. That’s kind of upsetting, but not a huge deal.

mixtab-2.png

The content that is presented in MixTab is out of their control. However, I wish they would work on a system to filter languages of posts and sources. I subscribe to several different Technology tabs, and many of them have international sources. However, I only speak English fluently, with some minor understanding of Spanish. I want to be able to control the language of my tabs.

Overall, I like MixTab. I feel like they have brought sometime good from iOS and made is work well on the Mac. If they fixed the two major issues I pointed out above, this would be a must-have app for me. As it stands, it’s only a nice addition to my arsenal. Sometimes, it takes more work than it should to use it effectively. I give it 3.5/5 stars. You can grab it for Free in the Mac App Store.

App: MixTab for Mac
Developer: MixTab Inc.
Price: Free
Score: 3.5/5 Stars

Tags: ,
Author: Tony Price Google Profile for Tony Price
Tony A. Price is a Nutrition and Dietetics Student from Louisiana in the United States. He has a deep passion for high end technology, mobile devices and applications, Mac hardware and software, and video gaming. His website is Tony's Brain, his Twitter handle is @TonyAllenPrice and you can follow him on Google+.

Tony Price has written and can be contacted at tony@techie-buzz.com.
  • the Mixtab Team

    Hi Tony,

    Thanks for reviewing Mixtab!

    Wanted to clarify, that in full screen mode we do show more stories, but it depends on your resolution.

    By default we show 6 stories per page, beyond 1400 pixels we show 12 stories per page, and we just added another mode that shows 15 stories per page on displays with resolutions wider than 1800 pixels.

    Also, we just released Mixtab 1.3 it adds the ability to organize your tabs ( Click “Edit Tabs” and you can drag the tabs to reorder them )

    Mixtab 1.3 also adds gestures, you can swipe left or right to navigate between pages.

    We also added Favorites, so now every story has a star that you can click on if you want to mark the story for later reading.

    Regards,

    The Mixtab Team

 
Copyright 2006-2012 Techie Buzz. All Rights Reserved. Our content may not be reproduced on other websites. Content Delivery by MaxCDN