App Magazine

An innovative, if flawed, attempt to bring relevant publishing onto the iPhone, iMagazine deserves credit for trying to do something new, at least. A fairly professional (but free) graphical review-based electronic magazine, in this case mainly dedicated to iPhone gaming, each issue contains around ten short (but illustrated) features and is easy to navigate around. At the time of writing, only five issues were available, but this is a publication that I’d like to see succeed, grow and be imitated.

Presumably HTML-based behind the scenes, each issue of iMagazine contains pages that can be multi-touch ’splayed’ in order to zoom in (to read the text), although (curiously) a double-tap doesn’t also zoom in, but merely zoom out, making getting to a nice text size for reading a little laborious. Embedded photos and screenshots can be scrolled to and zoomed in the same way and I was especially impressed that YouTube app demos can be embedded and played from within iMagazine – a very nice touch. Even better would have been buy/download hyperlinks for each feature to each relevant application entry in the App Store – maybe this is coming in a future update.

There’s no page index within each issue, meaning that getting back to page 2 from, say, page 12 is long-winded, and I was also very disappointed that there’s no landscape mode support – this would have made article reading a lot easier, given the relatively large amount of text content.

Issues need to be downloaded manually, but the master list is synced when you start iMagazine, so you’ll spot that there’s a new issue instantly. Each download takes around a minute over Wi-Fi, reasonable given the rich graphical content, but it should be noted that there seem to be corruptions in the first few issues and the application duly crashed and burned – subsequent issues seem more robust and hopefully the developers have things buttoned down now.

Despite my negative observations above, I love the concept. Yes, iMagazine could simply be a web page that you bookmark and then return to. Or it could be a RSS feed that you pick up in Google’s iPhone web version of Reader. But the developers have gone down the ‘virtual magazine’ route and I for one am rooting for them to succeed – I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the issues that work properly so far and it’s clearly still very early days for the publication and its concept.