Wow, today is a major day here at Onswipe as we’ve launched our largest release since our launch back in the Summer of 2011. We’re proud to release our New UI and the content network. We look at ourselves less like a software or tools company like Drupal, but more of a platform company like Tumblr or Twitter that lets people create as well as drive traffic. Stay tuned as this is just the start. We’re going to be releasing fast and often to build upon this vision.
The Content Network
We’ve always believed that Onswipe is a network of sites—not a tools company that treats each publisher like a silo. Today we’re starting to distribute content from our best publishers such as Ziff Davis, Stylecaster, Refinery29, the BBC, and thousands more publishers when they tap on the Rocketship inside the article. This lets readers find more interesting content, and publishers get more traffic from our millions of readers. If the tablet is the tv of this generation, then what we’re launching today is a lot like channel surfing.
New UI – Tight Twitter integration
Our belief is that social isn’t an afterthought, but rather a big part of the context of an article. Showing the faces of real people who have tweeted an article is a powerful thing. We’ve integrated Twitter directly to each article, showing the faces of who has tweeted it and the ability to seamlessly tweet from the article itself. We’ve also worked on tighter integration with Twitter for iPad. Publications partnered with Onswipe will now appear right inside the Twitter iPad app. We’ve spent a lot of time making sure articles and content look great and resolution-independent, even when the size of the Twitter browser is smaller than the screen.
New UI – The Peel
As we start to network all of our publishers together, we’ve added “The Peel” to the bottom left of each publication. This is a reliable, persistent place where users can learn more about the experience and where publishers can customize links to more information about their publication, such as an about page or advertising rate card. It’s also where we’ll soon let readers log in so publishers can have a deeper relationship with their touch device readers.
- Publisher pages such as about, contact us, advertise, etc.
- Area for settings and reader accounts
- Space for teaching users how to get the most out of Onswipe publications
- Damn cool effect
New UI – Handful of Reading and Under the Hood Improvements
Over the past six months we’ve spent a lot of time analyzing raw data and going with our gut instincts as a design-centric company to make the reading experience fluid. We’ve made a ton of UI improvements, including a refreshed aesthetic, new social tools on each article, and new gestures like double-tapping to create an enjoyable reading experience. We’ve also improved communication with the user dramatically—no startup is complete without its own “fail whale.” 
Under the hood, we’ve spent a ton of time rewriting the fundamental pieces of our platform for performance and speed, like our SwipeCore gesture recognition
We’ve also leveraged hardware acceleration and native scrolling within the browser to remove limits on content like categories and sections within a publication
- Gestures like double-tap to close
- New social interface
- Refreshed interface elements and aesthetic
- Our touch interaction library, SwipeCore, has been rewritten from the ground up
- Created a foundation for standards and markup to allow for layout and design customization
