APP OF THE DAY: Pinterest app for iPhone and iPad, just as fun on your mobile

It seems we all spent a huge chunk of January pinning photos of lovely scenery, beautiful faces and things we want onto the increasingly popular website, Pinterest. However, we’ve all been so busy re-pinning kitten photos during work hours that we haven’t really given the site’s brilliant iPhone app the time it really deserves…

As Pinterest depends so much on large, high quality visuals, you may think shrinking that experience down to a mobile screen would really suck the fun out of it. However, the Pinterest app manages to bring you a really intuitive interface, simple navigation tools and most importantly, great looking photos all on your iPhone, or even better your iPad.

Navigation

The app takes the site’s layout and brings it to a smaller screen with a simple menu along the bottom allowing you to see the pins of those you’re ‘following’, ‘explore’ pins from the big wide world of Pinterest and pick from a range of categories to browse, view your personal ‘activity’ or just go look at how pretty your ‘profile’ looks. There’s also an option to share photos from your phone, or take one straight away, and add it to one of your boards.

Images and Interaction

To make up for the fact you’re viewing everything on a much smaller screen, when you browse photos in the ‘following’ and ‘explore’ tabs each one takes up the width of the screen and you scroll up and down as apposed to seeing everything in a grid format. This way you can see the images in much more detail and actions like ‘repin’, ‘like’ and ‘comment’ are much much easier to use. Just like on the website you can tap on a photo to see its original source too, a great feature we’re really happy to see in the mobile version.

The ‘profile’ tab will still bring all of your pins up in a grid-like format, which makes sense if all you want to do is have a quick browse through all your images and not really engage with anyone else or repin an image.

Best bits

The design of the app is really clean and simple, very much like the website, which is great given there’s so little room to play with on a mobile screen.

Our favourite element of the app has to be the ‘explore’ tab, which allows you to fall into the rabbit hole that is Pinterest and browse through tonnes of different categories infinitely. No more boring commutes for us…

Available from iTunes for free.

Related: All you need to know about how to get started with Pinterest