StumbleUpon (for iPad)

When you?re in the mood to kick back with your iPad and do some Web surfing, do you ever get the feeling that there may be sites out there you should know about, but don?t? If so, you?re probably correct. With millions?of sites on the worldwide web, finding the best ones for your interests is no easy task. Sure, there?s Google and Bing, but sometimes you want site suggestions without having to come up with search terms. StumbleUpon, founded in 2001, helps eliminate that challenge by letting desktop users find cool links and tailoring the content based on subject matter and level of interest. The discovery service now comes to iOS as a free iPad app that lets users of Apple?s slate find, ban, like, and share pages, video, and photo. Well-designed, stable, and boasting an intuitive interface that surpasses the desktop version, StumbleUpon for iPad takes the chore out of finding fresh Web content?even more so than bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. It?s easily one of the best iPad apps to hit the App Store this year.

Service and Social Networking Setup
StumbleUpon isn?t a new service, but the iPad app is the definitive version of the service. The iPad?s 9.7-inch touchscreen display (which is roughly the size of a book, newspaper, or magazine) is an excellent venue to explore the Web with StumbleUpon?s app, as it lets you kick back on a sofa or relax in a bed while reading?no monitors, mice, laptops, or desktops necessary. After leaping from site to site on the iPad?initiating each leap by bring a finger to the ?Stumble!? icon?I found the desktop version clunky when I returned to my PC. StumbleUpon on the iPad is a terrific experience.

When you first fire up StumbleUpon on your iPad, you?re presented with the option to log in with an existing StumbleUpon account, sign in with your Facebook credentials, or create a new StumbleUpon account. After signing in, I granted the app permission to send notifications, use my location, and find my StumbleUpon friends (culled from either Address Book, Facebook, or Twitter). This let me see the Web pages, photos, videos, and profile information that they?ve shared. The app even gave me the opportunity to invite non-StumbleUpon users into the fold. Overall, the setup process was swift and simple.

The Adventure Begins
The Home screen features a dark black background with the StumbleUpon logo and various content categories highlighted in a light-gray font. The upper-left portion of the screen is a help box that explains the gist of the StumbleUpon experience: ?Each tap of the ?Stumble? button takes you to a new discovery.?

So tap I did. My first Stumble took me to the Bronx Zoo?s ?Boo at the Zoo? Halloween celebration page; a second brought a page about World War II dogfighting to my attention. I gave interesting pages the thumbs up by tapping the ?I like it!? icon in the upper-right corner of the screen (this helps the app learn your interests and appropriately tailor content that it delivers). To the left of that icon is a thumb?s down icon that let me ban a page. You can return a positive or negative vote back to neutral by tapping the icon again. Overall, I was quite pleased with the content that StumbleUpon pushed to my iPad?it was well within the interest categories that I selected when I created my account?and found the discovery process more passive and relaxing than Digg or Reddit?s as pages came to me.

Tapping the sharing icon opened a drop-down box that let you share a page via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and other avenues. A gray bar above the content area displayed the name of the StumbleUpon user who liked the presented pages, images, and video. When I tapped a user?s name, StumbleUpon opened that person?s profile page which displayed favorite links, followers, and a button that lets you stumble only within that person?s favorites?a nice touch. I found it especially useful when rifling through a user profile that contained many links. Tapping ?Comments & Info? displayed the number of users who liked a link and the comments left. You can also leave comments of your own.

StumbleUpon ?lead me to dozens of interesting reads, both obscure and mainstream, that I may have never found had I not had the app. Everyday Mysteries and Dark Room are just two of the manysites I?ve stumbled upon that are now part of my daily rotation.

Customizing Content
You can filter the content that?s delivered to the iPad by tapping ?All Interests,? to open a drop-down menu. There you can choose to view content only from StumbleUpon friends, or a particular media type such as photos, videos, or news. Tapping ?Interest? at the bottom of the drop-down menu showed the subjects that you added when you created an account. I wanted to remove a few of the categories I added, but there wasn?t any obvious way to delete them. I swiped subjects, pressed and held categories?nothing.? I tapped ?Add Interests? in a moment of curiosity, which let me not only add new categories (such as Action Movies, Quotes, and Weight Loss), but? swipe to delete pre-selected items. I was completely befuddled why the option to remove content would be buried in an area where you add content; ?Add Interests? should be renamed ?Edit? (as it is on the home screen) to cut confusion.

If you long to explore the breadth of the Web, StumbleUpon for iPad is a near-perfect companion. It brings unfamiliar, but interesting, links to your attention in a way that search engines cannot?after all, when was the last time that you performed a search and ventured beyond page two? StumbleUpon very nicely adds to the iPad reading experience, making it an app that?s very worthy of our Editors? Choice Award.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/xTJYVg1ItCo/0,2817,2395255,00.asp

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