New Tips And Triks For You

The social magazine mobile app comes to the Web but without all of its parts.

Flipboard, the app that lets you tap and flip your way through digital magazines on smartphones and tablets, has come to laptops and desktops. You can now access your Flipboard account from a Web browser, complete with the flip animation -- for better or worse. You can also use the Web app to create your own magazines to clip articles for later viewing via a bookmarklet. But the magazines you create are kept separate from the rest of Flipboard on the Web, which makes the Web app a better addendum to the mobile app than standalone product.

(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

From the Flipboard Community page, you can jump into popular Flipboard magazines, but there is no way to log into your account. You can navigate the graphically rich magazines using the arrow keys, the space (and Shift-spacebar to go back), and -- on a MacBook at least -- swiping up and down with two fingers on your laptop's touchpad. You also hold down shift when using the arrow keys to skip the flip animation. For each magazine, there is a subscribe button on its cover page, and for each article within, you can hit the "+" to add it to one of your magazines. The thing is, from this Community page, you can't access your own magazines.

(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

To access your own magazines, you need to be on the Flipboard Editor page. After logging into your account, you'll see any magazines you created with the mobile app along with a button to create new magazines using your browser. You own magazines don't get the flip-animation treatment; instead, you'll see a grid of thumbnails, which might be the more useful presentation of the two. You can view and edit your profile here, too, but the only section is My Magazines. The My Subscriptions section that you see below it on the mobile app goes missing for reasons unknown. So, if you subscribe to a magazine when viewing it on the Web, there is no way to access it via your subscriptions without grabbing your tablet or smartphone and using the mobile app.

(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

Go to the Flipboard Share page to add a bookmarklet to your browser, which you can use to add articles from around the Web to one of your Flipboard magazines. Drag the button to your bookmarks bar (making sure your bookmarks bar is visible first) and you'll be able to clip articles to one of your Flipboard magazines for later viewing -- either on the Web or from the mobile app.