The Grand Tour: The New Yahoo App

The Grand Tour: The New Yahoo App

When I joined Yahoo, my overlords and I agreed that I would no longer review one company’s products: Yahoo’s. I can’t review new Yahoo apps or services, because, of course, I’m paid by Yahoo, and that wouldn’t be very objective, now would it?

On the other hand, now that I’m an insider, there’s one thing I can do that I couldn’t before: Explain and give tours of Yahoo things.

The company is very proud, for example, of its new, improved Yahoo app for iPhone and Android. There are lots of Yahoo apps, but this one is the flagship.

In this app, you’ll find Yahoo’s most popular stuff, all in one place:

  • Today’s weather (from Yahoo Weather) and top news (from Yahoo News Digest)

  • All the articles you’d find on the Yahoo home page

  • All of Yahoo’s digital magazines—including Yahoo Tech!

In the video above, I’ve demonstrated the three essential tricks to getting the most out of the new Yahoo app.

Trick 1: Grasp the layout

When you first fire up the App, you’re on the All Stories screen. Your local weather is at the top. Scroll down to see an endless stream of tiles, representing all the news stories from Yahoo’s front page and all of its digital magazines.

If you swipe to the left, you see the individual pages for Yahoo’s magazines and individual department categories: News, your city, Entertainment, Celebrity, Business, Finance, Technology, Sports, Media, Society, Science, Politics.

And if you swipe to the right, you see pages for all of Yahoo’s magazines. There are now magazines for Yahoo Music, TV, Makers, Food, Beauty, Health, Travel, Movies, Parenting, Style, and, of course, my own baby, Yahoo Tech.

In short, here’s what the Yahoo app’s starting layout looks like:

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Notice, by the way, the News page (first screen to the right of center). At the top, you get to see a slideshow of today’s most important news stories, as reported by the Yahoo News Digest app. Tap here to open the Digest app to read more about ‘em.

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What’s cool is that if you go do other things and then return to the Yahoo app, whatever screen you left open will still be there. So if you never look at anything but the Yahoo Tech—an understandable position—you have, in effect, a Yahoo Tech app.

Trick 2: Rearrange the screens

About that left-to-right page sequence I just described: You can change it.

You might want Yahoo Tech, for example, to be dead center in the lineup—again, an understandable impulse.

Here’s how to do that: Tap the top-left icon (1), and then tap Edit Categories (2). Boom: here’s the master list of all the left-to-right screens in the Yahoo app (3). Except here, they’re listed top-to-bottom.

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You can hide the ones you never read (turn off the check marks). Better yet, you can grab the “grip strip” off to the right—and drag it up or down, changing the sequence of the pages.

Once you’re finished, tap the X in the top right corner, twice, to return to the app.

Trick 3: The hyper-table-of-contents

See the title of the screen you’re on?

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That’s actually a channel-changer. You can swipe just the title to the left or right to make it spin through all the page titles. Using this trick, you can zoom directly to another page or magazine title, skipping over the ones in between. Tap that title to jump to the corresponding page.

There’s more stuff in the app—Search, saving articles for later, notifications—but they’re easy to find.

So there you have it: A tour of the Yahoo app. My work is done here!

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