FLUD is a mobile news app that grabs the headlines and images from your favorite websites and presents it in a magazine-like format. The company has offered iPhone and iPad for a while, and this week FLUD launched its first Android app.
When you first load the app it will pull in news from a handful of popular websites, but you can add to the list by choosing websites by name, topic, or URL. You can also add RSS feeds from your Google Reader account.
You flip between news sites by scrolling left or right, and FLUD creates an attractive cover page for each with large images and headlines. When you tap to read an article, you’ll see a streamlined view with text and an image, but few ads and no sidebars.
As with most other apps of this type, FLUD can only display the content that’s available in an RSS feed. So if you add sites that use partial feeds you’ll only see a few lines of each article. If you add sites that offer full text feeds you’ll see the whole thing.
You can hit a heart button on any article to “love” it and add it to your bookmarks page, share articles using Facebook, Twitter, or other apps.
If you read dozens or hundreds of websites every day, FLUD might not be the best app for organizing your news. But it’s one of the more attractive newsreaders available if you only have a few top sites you want to negotiate daily.
