Ever since Marissa Mayer took the CEO job in the summer of 2012, mobile software and digital magazines have been a big part of her turnaround efforts at Yahoo.
Having released new apps like News Digest and revamped key ones such as Mail, Search and Weather, the pioneering Internet company’s focus now sharpens on its namesake mobile app.
Now available in the App Store, the new Yahoo 6.0 sports a redesigned appearance with fresh new features that make it more in line with Yahoo’s new digital strategy while resembling Flipboard in certain functional aspects.
In addition to a fresh new visual style and improved navigation with category headlines, this edition of Yahoo for iPhone brings enhanced digital magazine with interactive features at your fingertips.
A typical example: you can swipe to see “before” and “after” shots of the “Cake of the Day” recipe on Yahoo Food, as seen on the animated GIF below. Other digital magazines implement these interactive features as well.
For instance, you can swipe to see Johnny Depp’s character transformations on Yahoo Movies, elevating your reading experience up a notch. Or, if you go to Yahoo Style you can vote “who wore it best” by dragging the sliders around. As mentioned above, these interactive features are available across each Yahoo Magazine category.
“We’ve also added our award-winning Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News Digest content above the stream for your two favorite categories, All Stories and News,” notes the firm.
If you haven’t fired up the app in a while, I strongly urge you to do so — you’ll be surprised at how accomplished, friendly and inviting it’s become.
It feels like a brand new app, really.
In addition to digital magazines and a personalized feed of stories and articles across a dozen categories with notifications for breaking news, the software combines your local weather, trending photos and videos, stocks and other popular Yahoo properties into a single, neatly packaged experience.
And based on Yahoo’s acquisition of Summly, the app bring you a shorter, compressed versions of the article before reading its full version (News Digest and other Yahoo apps also use Summary’s summarization algorithms).
The new experience is available to iPhone users in the United States for the time being. The 51-megabyte app supports any iPhone, iPod touch and iPad model with iOS 7.0 or later.