_iPad App Review – Magazines

Today I am taking a look at Magazines.  Lets see how these publications translate to the iPad.

Men’s Health

Men’s Health is a ‘container’ app that you can view and purchase other issues.  They do a OK job with this app.  The content is lifted straight from the print piece  and put into the iPad.  So swiping through pages is the normal.  What you see in print is what you see in the iPad.  The one thing they added is interactivity ‘on-top’ of the pages.  What I mean by that is when you land on an article blue plus signs light up where you can interact.  You can view a video or take a poll.  It is nice since it takes the guess work on what your supposed to do.

BMW Magazine

Talk about a glorified PDF reader.  No interaction except for some hot spots to link out to the web.

Wired

There has been a tremendous amount of hype surrounding this app.  The hype was around 2 areas, the first being the app itself and the second being the controversy of Adobe building the app in Flash, which Apple denied.  That is another story.  The app itself, in my opinion falls short.  The app does not train the user into what to do next.  Your left clicking (touching) and swiping random spots just to see if anything is linked.  There are ads that do some interaction and others where you think there would be but do not.

_iPad App Review

If your a techie or into the digital world you have heard by now of this device called an iPad.  Even if you are not a techie, you probably have heard about it.  More and more companies are jumping at developing applications for the device and are inventing new ways to interact with it.  Some of the applications are good, some are not.  The iPad provides the developer with more screen real estate than the iPhone so options can be a little greater when it comes to creativity.

I will be taking a look at a few applications from Brands or Publishing companies.  The reason I am choosing that avenue is I am a Technologist at Story Worldwide and need to keep up on the trends and happenings that my clients competition is doing.  There are some great apps developed solely by independent developers, which I may feature but for now just Brands.

The 3 I have chosen are the following, Nike Football, Financial Times and the Weather Channel

Nike Football

The Nike Football app gets high marks with me.  Very easy to use.  Vibrant colors and a ton of videos.  A few things I like are the use of the bottom portion of the screen to put simple navigation to go from section to section.  I enjoy the large use of images on every screen and the ability to orientate the iPad and the screen shifting to a better and more usable position.

Financial Times

Yet another newspaper app, this one succeeds.  They don’t try to do too much with it.  FT presents the articles clean and the navigation between them is easy.  They provide an indicator to get back to the start or the main page of the newspaper on the left hand side.  I feel that is easy to find since you a swiping left and right.  The other big plus is the background color is a tan/parchment color which is easy on the eyes.  Much nicer than the standard white background.

The Weather Channel

If you have the Weather Channel app for the iPhone then you are fully aware of its features.  The iPad version is the same thing just in a bigger format.  Radar maps are bigger, video is bigger, 10 day forecast is bigger.