King of the Hill: Popular Science+

After seeing this mentioned in Mr. Job's presentation I was excited to give it a try and so paid $5 to install the application. The problem is all of the "advances" are actually horrible in practice! At least in a magazine you can look in the index and flip to an article you wish to read. Not here-- its linear, making you flip through all of the full screen advertisements. You can jump between sections, but as a non-subscriber I have no idea what the sections are, and there's no way to go to the article one wishes to read even if you did know what section it was in. But perhaps the worse part are the extra special tortures invented by Bonnier for this application. They mention how "panning" is the new page flipping, which in practice means the text is overlaid on images so its really hard to read, and then jumps down to another non-page when you're in the middle of trying to read it. This is absolutely maddening as its impossible to read with little blocks of text randomly moving all over the place. There is an index, but its less functional that a magazine's. At least in a magazine you can look up the page number of an article to read it. If you try to tap on the name of an article in this iPad application the index just disappears altogether. The index seems to serve no purpose as its not interactive and as there are no pages anyway, so there's no way to find the articles except by looking at each and every advertisement. There's so much promise for an interactive magazine its hard to fathom how this could have gone so wrong. I have one piece of advice for the designers for the next time: we're living in the age of the browser and interactivity. You might try making the iPad application the slightest bit interactive.

Michael Czeiszperger, April 9, 2010