Reading on the iPad Part 12: Drop Fast Company's app. They have.

I have another blog, Angry Poetnerd for posts where I have only bad things to say. By rights this posting should go to that blog.

With the May 2017 issue, Fast Company stopped doing any extra work to re-render for the iPad app. Instead the regular printed version was loaded verbatim into the app with no post processing, and no additional work on the app to deal with the new requirements.

• Small, unreadable font: No ability to enlarge the font was added, so you were stuck with the large form factor magazine page in the small form factor iPad screen. This is a problem for near-sighted readers like myself.
• Links needed but not supported: No links were included to go to or get back from articles that were continued elsewhere in the issue.
• No additional navigation aids offered: To get to a continuation or back from it, you use trial and error either with the scroll bar and page flipping.

I Emailed Customer Care and the Letter to the Editor addresses raising my concerns. I never heard back from the Editor, but Customer Care was happy to refund the unused fraction of my subscription so that I could switch to Zinio.

I appreciate that creating an iPad-specific design and rendering is expensive. I'm personally skeptical of its value. But the way Fast Company transitioned out of this model was terrible. The change was un-announced and completely ruined the reading experience for me. I am only continuing as a subscriber because of the availablity of Fast Company via Zinio.  Zinio offers an excellent balance of cost and benefit for reading on the iPad. See also: Reading on the iPad Part 11: Zinio, My New Favorite

I continue to highly recommend that magazine publishers switch to Zinio. For example the IEEE. qmags still hasn't fixed any of the problems I flagged years ago. They have been surpassed by Zinio, but, alas, the IEEE has not yet noticed.

In related news:

The IEEE Computer Society has quit offering IEEE Computer via qmags. Sadly, they didn't adopt Zinio. There was a self congratulatory note sent out touting the additional formats available instead. For example, Kindle Format. Alas, the Kindle rendering was as bad as the Forbes rendering I reviewed back in 2011 (Reading on the iPad Part 6: Forbes was a disappointment.) I summarize the relevant bit:

The beautiful glossy magazine had been ground down into a cheap paperback book. The pages shrank down to 3x6 inches and the typography was reduced to a single font in only a couple point sizes. Colorful icons and graphical navigational aids were eliminated and everything re-formatted into block paragraphs. But as if to comply with a marketing directive to be able to say, "We offer color!" a very few select photographs were retained as "color plates" scattered throughout.

Forbes sensibly abandoned that format. The IEEE Computer Society has yet to learn what was obvious to some of us in 2011.

Pretty much the only rendering of IEEE Computer I find useful is the PDF format. With a few clicks I can get from the Email announcing the new issue through the iPad web browser into iBooks. If only Apple would copy Zinio's great interface for organizing magazine issues and bookmarks across items.

I feel that the IEEE Computer Society got caught up in offering a list of features, and lost contact with how to provide the best user experience. In my opinion, inadequate outreach was made to their own contacts in the User Experience realm.

PiDP-8 USB Hack

I have just finished building a PiDP-8/I from a fantastic kit offered by Oscar (Obsolescence Guaranteed) Vermeulen. This is a 2/3 scale reproduction of the front panel of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8/I computer. Inside is a Raspberry Pi using SIMH (See also: SIMH project on GitHub.) to emulate a PDP-8. The PDP-8/I has a special place in my heart as the first computer I really got to know. You always remember your first...

One of the challenges is to bring the various and sundry connections through the bamboo case out to the world in a pleasing manner. I managed this:

Details on the connectors:

The power, audio, and HDMI extenders were findable with care.

Power was pretty straightforward.  I went with one from Renrii sold through Amazon, but I see it is no longer available, only a month later. Word of advice, look closely at the pictures, "Left Angle" and "Right Angle" are used inconsistently from vendor to vendor.

Audio extender to the box was straightforward.  I picked up this one from Amazon:  [Benly-38] Right Angle 4-pole 1/8" 3.5mm Stereo Plug / Male to Straight 4-pole 1/8" 3.5mm Stereo Jack / Female Aux Headphone Cable 0.55 Feet (17cm) Wvyr-4l4sf-15

But once outside the box, if you want to split the 4 pole 1/8" jack into separate RCA connectors, you must buy VERY carefully.  The assignments are not standardized, and some of the splitters have ground where you need signal.  My recommendation:  Buy new/old stock Zune a/v output cable. I got mine from a third party seller on Amazon:  Zune A/V Output Cable (Discontinued by Manufacturer). I confess I've not tested this yet, so I'm not 100% sure this is right.

For HDMI, I tried a cheaper one, but it failed to fit.  So I went with the Vanco 233306X 6" Right Angle Super Flex HDMI High Speed Male to Female Cable with Flat Top from Amazon.

I used standoffs to mount the PiDP-8/I, and then glued a 1/4 inch wood shim to the bottom of the box. This is to improve friction fit, serve as strain relief, and provide a surface to epoxy to.

I did some careful measuring and established a baseline for my connectors that would descend a bit into the wood shim.  Then I drilled a couple holes, and used a rotary tool and wood carver's tools to make the holes mostly shaped like the connectors.  A couple times, I lost control of the rotary tool and scraped up the box.  For example the line above the power connector you see in the final picture below. My holes are less than perfectly shaped.

The USB Hack:

The USB and hard-wired network connectors of the Raspberry Pie were quite close to the edge. Some people just cut a hole in the box, but I wanted to try and make an extender that would work in a confined space. But there is very little clearance between the Raspberry Pie and the case.

For me this meant cutting up a standard USB connector and hacking up a cable. My first attempt failed as the pins broke off. Here are the steps I took to get to the cut-down connector that did work.
Mouser Electronics was a quite reasonably priced source of male and female USB connectors.

1. Start with a USB Male connector.

2. Use a cutting wheel.

3. Cut the sides at the notch. 

4. Side cuts to guide the main cut.

5. Cut the metal.

6. Then the nylon 

7. Solder it up and your done?

8. The pins break right off.

9. Second try. Cut here.

10. Clear the nylon above the pins. 

11. The wires fit well in the well.

12. Power, Signal, and Chassis Ground.

13. Magic elixir!

14 Protects physically and electrically.

15. Carefully carve out  the case
where the USB connector will land.

16. NOW you are done!

Reading on the iPad Part 11: Zinio, My New Favorite

I can't believe that the most recent update to this series was nearly two and a half years ago!
I should have written this installment months ago, but blogging gets too small a pie-slice of my life.

In this installment I review Zinio. I like Zinio very much. It is the iPad magazine reading app that I have wanted since day 1. Here is why:

My judgment criteria:

To review, in part 2 I defined my personal criteria that defined as a "good" reader:

• Did the reader offer a good, "turn all the pages" interface when I wanted it?
• Did the publication offer a good table of contents summary and easy fetch when I wanted it?
• Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?
• Was the interface familiar, sensible, and obvious?

In the course of several years of experience I found additional criteria:

• Does the reader return to the page I left off when I resume after doing something else?
• Does the reader avoid distracting additional features?
• Does the reader allow easy setting/clearing/visiting of bookmarks?
• Is navigation easy within an issue?
• Is navigation easy between issues?
• Does the reader app stay up and running without crashing?

How Zinio found me:

I had a paper subscription to Out magazine, but I had a problem: The scented cologne ads freaked out my nose and some issues were unreadable because of the stench! Their customer service department graciously offered to extend my subscription and switch it to digital through their partner Zinio.

I'd never head of Zinio, and it took me a while to schedule time to try out the app. But when I finally took the time with a trial issue I found it quite adequate.

Meanwhile I encountered a readability problem with Forbes on the Maz app: In January 2014 Forbes re-designed the iPad layout with a much bigger font. In the paper edition and the old format on Maz, I could quickly flip the pages, skim to content and zoom in on details I wanted to read. In the new Format, a 2 page article became 5 pages. I could no longer skim effectively. Furthermore, I kept hitting the wrong part of the screen and activating the "Select Text to Share" feature.

What I formerly viewed as the fastest and most robust reader that I liked best, had turned into the most annoying experience of all of the readers. I exchanged some emails with the CEO of Maz, but he said that his hands were tied -- that Forbes insisted on the new design.

I exchanged email with Lewis D'Vorkin, Chief Product Officer of Forbes, who said he would look into my issues. Nobody ever followed up. I sent a couple of follow-ups myself but got no reply. It got to the point where I got too angry even to open the Forbes Maz interface. I went back to paper.

It turned out that there was a Forbes subscription available through Zinio. It gave me exactly the experience I wanted in the first place. It kept what was good about the paper edition design without distractions from additional features or crashes. I love it!

How does Zino do by my judgment criteria?

Zinio uses the paper layout of the magazine rather than a "special for iPad design".

• Yes, it offers a "turn all the pages" interface.
• Yes, it has a good table of contents summary and easy fetch. Specifically, it offers two table of contents interfaces: Tap on the article entry in the magazine's contents pages, or tap on the icon at the top that looks like an outline.
• Yes, the content is in front of me when I want to read it. I do not have to wait. Indeed I can turn the pages in Zinio even on my ancient iPad FASTER than I can turn the pages of a paper magazine.
• Yes, the interface is familiar, sensible and obvious. The pinch and draw and the double tap magnify interface is there. Rotating between landscape and portrait mode works just fine. Switching amongst issues and publications is simple and direct.
• Yes, the reader returns to the page I left off with 100% reliability. Something that qmags STILL does not do.
• Yes, the reader avoids distracting additional features.
• Yes, the reader allows easy setting/clearing and visiting of bookmarks. Indeed it gets right what Wired can't seem to get right: Going to bookmarks in a different issue than the one I am currently reading. In Wired there is a bug where I tap on a book mark in an issue I'm not currently reading and get an error message. In Zinio it opens the other issue and takes me where I want to go.
• Yes, navigation within the magazine is easy. Flipping pages, the thumbnail view,  the page grid view, the table of contents view or the bookmarks page.
• Yes, navigation between issues makes sense.  The bookmark interface handles this well too.
• Yes, the app stays up without crashing.

All in all, I find using Zinio a joy! That is where I read Forbes, Out, and The Advocate. It is where I would like to read IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Computer and CACM instead of the current apps on offer.

I plan to drop Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review a note and let him know that there is a digital custodian available for his print publication that does everything we hoped TR's foray into the app world would have done if it could have gotten debugged and put into production at reasonable cost.

I am considering switching my Fast Company subscription over to Zinio. I have to take a little time and compare the two apps head to head.

There may come a day when all the fancy video add-ons and half-working links out to the Wired.com gets to be too annoying and I switch that subscription over to Zinio.

A friend with the big-screen iPad let me install Zinio to play with. The big-screen iPad basically reproduces the full page of a paper magazine with 100% fidelity both in picture quality and size.

I tried out Zinio on the Microsoft Surface at the Microsoft store, and it seemed to work just fine. Sadly, back at the Apple Store, there was NO demo model that could let me play with Zinio there, so I have no experience with Zinio on the faster, newer iPads that have superseded mine.

Downsides:

Zinio is it's own subscription world. You have to switch from subscribing through the original publisher to subscribing through Zinio. However the Zinio folks do try to make this easy.

The Zinio Shop interface is a bit pushy, but wow they have a lot of publications on offer!

I did have a little trouble finding my 2015 issues when the year turned over to 2015, but eventually figured out I needed to click on year to see a list of years to pick from, and go back.

Conclusions:

People who know me know that I'm the sort who finds 99 wrong things before I find one right thing. I am extremely difficult to please. Zinio pleases me very much.

Now that I have it, this is the reader app I have been looking for from the beginning.

It gets right what the others get wrong.

It has a huge catalog of publications available.

I recommend it for readers and publishers alike.

Aspiring to Essentialism #1

Background:

How to describe the state of desperation that led me to Greg McKeown's book, Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less?

From the outside, I look like a hyper-organized, hyper-busy person who gets a lot done.  But inside I feel a continuous and near overwhelming pair of feelings: 

• fear of failure -- I can't accomplish what truly matters because there isn't enough time.
• self doubt -- I've chosen the wrong thing to work on and invested myself in what didn't matter.

Through a near obsession with self help books to manage time and improve productivity, I've mastered many useful techniques and explored many good ideas, but those two feelings never abated. For years, I have expressed the desire to "focus on the few things that mattered" but always find myself spread too thin, pursuing too many options, and feeling afraid and doubtful as I tried to cram ever more into my day.

I picked up McKeown's Essentialism seeking insights to identify and change the habits that kept me overworked, overwhelmed and under-satisfied. I hoped for techniques to apply to that oft expressed and never realized goal: to build a satisfying life focused on the few things that truly mattered.

Having finished the book, I have this to say about it:

• McKeown's distinction of "Essentialist" vs. "Non-essentialist" spoke to me profoundly.
• My personal evolution led me to habits directly opposed to finding "the few things that mattered."
• McKeown's structure for defining, embracing and maintaining Essentialism looks workable.
• I will have to change a little bit about everything I do.
• Weighing in at 275 pages, the book wasn't long enough.

This Aspiring to Essentialism blog series is my personal attempt to address those last two points.  I need daily practice at picking up the one most important obstacle and working to remove it.  The book has various stories that are helpful to understanding, but I feel the need for more.  So with the short term goal of, "Experiment with McKeown's directive to write in a journal daily" and the long term goal of "Live the life of the few things that matter", I hope to write stories here.

Perhaps others will find them useful.

Reading on the iPad Part 10: It's a changing world. Keep up!

Recently the Association for Computing Machinery made an app available to read their glossy magazine, Communications of the ACM (CACM for short.) I will be providing a review of it in part 11, but first I wanted to check in on how the other apps I've tried out have stood the test of time.

Summary of past reviews:

Back in August 2011, I said the app for The Economist was my favorite, followed closely by the app for Wired. I also expressed my disappointment with the app for The Wall Street Journal. I liked the 3rd party app from qmags.com for reading IEEE Spectrum and advocated its broader use.

I gave a negative review of the Forbes experience in 2011, then revised it in March 2013 to say that the third party app from MAZ was a dramatic improvement but it still wasn't ideal. From those past reviews I ranked the experiences as:

1. The Economist app -- My Favorite; Gets the glossy magazine experience right: easy to read, quick to turn pages. Offers audio word for word.
2. Wired app -- Sets the standard. Also easy to read with fast page turning. Excellent organizational aids and bookmarking. Clever use of extra media, but it's sometimes gratuitous.
3. IEEE Spectrum on qmags app -- Reproduces the magazine. Resizing the page is necessary for folks with imperfect eyesight. Page turning reasonably quick. Reasonable links for article continuations. Occasional crashes that one works around by using bookmarks.
4. Boston Business Journal and other generic pdf files in iBooks -- Rudimentary, but responsive. A working generic solution is better than  a clever solution with bugs.
5. Forbes on 3rd app, MAZ -- Almost as good as qmags, but lacked bookmarking, was slower, and crashed more often.
6. Fast Company app -- Similar to Wired, but was portrait mode (tall instead of wide) only.
7. Wall Street Journal on website online.wsj.com -- Adequate summaries and easy access to articles. Occasional production problems that seem to show it's the under-funded, un-loved delivery mechanism.
8. Books and pdf files in the Kindle app -- iBooks seemed like a more graceful interface.
9. The Wall Street Journal app -- It's no good viewing a broadsheet newspaper scrunched down to iPad screen size. A different approach is needed. Also the interface was gratuitously different from iPad standards.

Where we are today:

At that time of my Forbes update, I felt no need to revise the other reviews. Today I do, primarily driven by the improved robustness of the MAZ app, and by how the other apps don't seem to have improved much.

"Improved" can be a subjective term, because many aspects of user interface come down to matters of familiarity and comfort. Even so, it might be bad after this much time has elapsed for the app for The Wall Street Journal to abandon its unique interpretation of the pinch gesture -- even though I personally hate how it's different from the standard action on the iPad.

To me, improvements would consist of:

• Fewer crashes.
• Faster start-up times.
• Greater speed in turning pages.
• Additional key functionality, such as navigation aids and book marks.

By this criteria, the apps for Wired, qmags, and Fast Company seem to have made no progress. By way of full disclosure, I will mention that I have not extensively used the app for The Economist because I use their word-for-word audio in the car. I also almost never use the app for The Wall Street Journal, because I can't stand it.

Although I would prefer that the MAZ app got book marking and additional navigational aids, I must say that the performance and robustness of the app have improved and surpassed that of qmags.

Indeed, I am regularly disappointed that when I leave and then later return to Wired or IEEE Spectrum. The app has restarted and forgotten what page I was on. Indeed the Wired app takes a surprisingly and unpleasantly long time to start. Additionally, the qmags app often simply crashes while I'm reading.

The MAZ app seems to have had some good work done. It used to crash, and often forgot what page I left off upon. Now it turns pages much more quickly and manages always to remember where I left off. Kudos to MAZ!

New Conclusions:

It does seem that there are two approaches to the iPad app:

1. Producing a special layout for the iPad with a readable font size.
2. Utilizing the paper layout, and letting the person doing the reading resize.

The former is used by Conde Nast for the Wired app, as well as the apps for The Economist, and Fast Company. In fact I could not find a font resizing control on the app for Fast Company. I see that the app for Wired has one, but I never needed it and only just now went to look for it. I can appreciate that producing a tablet friendly layout is probably expensive, and probably drove the decision to be portrait orientation only, and to not support resizing.

Lately I find myself resizing every single page to read IEEE Spectrum on qmags, and I don't like doing that. I have to do that with the MAZ app to read Forbes, but not quite as often. Recognizing these two approaches have different costs, I can respect MAZ and qmags for adopting mode #2, but I find mode #1 much more pleasant.

The investments made in the more expensive production and apps needs to be followed by continued maintenance and improvement. Sadly the leaders seem content to rest on their laurels and this is probably a mistake.

Advice to the various publishers:

Conde Nast: You guys need to fix two things about the app for Wired:

1. It needs to start up faster. 
2. It needs to remember which page was current and return to it on restart. 

These are things that the much less ambitious app from MAZ gets right, and now it makes you look bad.  Additionally, even the second version of your bookmarking interface is clunky.  Please consider something simpler like how iBooks and the Kindle app do it.

qmags.com: You guys should consider pooling your resources with MAZ. Failing that, you need to get your developers to spend some time making the app crash less often, and teaching it how to remember the active page for restarts.

Fast Company: I'm still disappointed that you guys are "portrait mode only" and that text cannot be resized.  That said, you seem to have learned many good lessons from the example set by the app for Wired.

Dow Jones & Co.: Pretty please put additional resources behind making your web site more robust. The missing columns on the front page are an embarrassment. Additionally, you guys really should consider a rethink of the layout for the app. A broadsheet page will never look right on a tablet.

MAZ: You guys did a great job of addressing performance, robustness, and restart issues with your app. Well done! Pretty please consider adding bookmarking. Also, recognizing it's an additional production cost that your customers might not want, do please consider offering the article navigator view like Wired and Fast Company offer.

ACM and IEEE: You guys should consider switching to MAZ. It may do a better job than what you've currently got going.

Apple: Too many subscriptions through the iPad are over-priced compared to the "free" online access I get from my print subscription.  The recycling bin is full of Wired and other magazines because of your myopia here.  Make it easier for publishers to make the online only version cheaper, not more expensive than the print edition that includes the online edition.

Is it supposed to work like that? #1 iTunes and app data.

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of articles addressing the question:  How can we make things more useful, learning lessons from what has been tried in the past.

My dad was an artist, tool maker and master craftsman.  He had a powerful ability to find what was wrong and a powerful desire, once a wrong thing was found to make it right.  He worked very hard to instill these aspects into me.  Even though I've specialized in the computer realm, I find myself all too often exclaiming in my dad's invective how wrong some tool, appliance or computer program is, and how much I wish it could be made right.

My challenge here is to distill suggestions for affirmative action to take rather than to merely complain.

At the very least, to those with less technical insight than I, I propose to answer the question, "Is it supposed to work like that?" with answers of the form, "Not really.  Here's why.  Here's what can be done.  Here's what you can do."

So on to our first exploration:

Is it supposed to work like that? #1 iTunes and app data.

Today I wanted to copy some sheet music I'd scanned onto my iPad for use within the amazing and wonderful forScore app  (http://www.forscoreapp.com/). I use this app in Chorus rehearsal instead of paper scores.  I don't drop pages on the floor, and I can make extensive annotations when needed.

My problem is that months elapse between each update of music.  Every time, I have to re-learn how to copy the the scores in:

1. Open iTunes
2. Plug my iPad into my Desktop computer.
3. Click on the iPad button to get to the contents of the iPad
4. Click on the Apps button
5. Scroll past the list of apps to the bottom "File Sharing" section
6. Click on the forScore icon
7. Drag my scores into the "Documents" window.

Apple is supposed to have the simplest and most usable interfaces.  Is it supposed to be like this?

Not really:  This is an example of how if you haven't thought carefully about how a person will end up using your simple idea, the result is overly complex and not very usable.

Here's why: Indeed, organizing objects -- papers, books, music, etc.  is a difficult and complex process. 

Something that made sense to computer folk, a tree structured generic filesystem, proved mystifying to non-computer people.  The developers had spent a lot of time trying to organize stuff, and as a consequence when the interface of, "a display that shows the files in this folder, and where this folder sits in a hierarchy" they were happy, and thought they were done.

But lots of people who use computers don't even have a lot of experience of filing papers in a folder in a filing cabinet.  And presented with the computer equivalent, they get confused, and lost.  Things seem too complicated.

Perhaps the developers of iTunes thought, "If we just have a few simple folders, people can drag the few things they want to where it belongs, and they won't have to master that hierarchical filesystem thing."

That worked fine when it was just music, and then when you added a couple different other kinds of media, audio books, books, podcasts.  But now we have "anything an application might want to use" has made that a long list of places, and the iTunes interface is just a messy hierarchical filesystem, with stuff jammed into strange places that are more an artifact of when that kind of new thing was added, than to where it intuitively would belong.

Here's what can be done:  iTunes needs to be simplified, and not try to provide individual, "obvious places where each little thing should go," because that list has gotten too long.  Everything that's pretending to be a filesystem interface should be stripped BACK out of iTunes, and you should go back to the regular hierarchical filesystem.  Let people learn ONE hierarchical filesystem instead of having to learn the iTunes one in addition to the native one on the computer.

But that'st not all.  A simple interface for each app needs to be provided so that people who only want a couple things, they can get directly to what they want to do, without having to master a computer's hierarchical filesystem.  There should be file sharing that can be "pulled" from inside the apps running on the iPad. Perhaps iCloud will grow into being able to do this.

Here's what you can do:  Use Dropbox as a rendezvous point.  

Sadly this is complicated initial startup.  You need to create a drop box account, and get the dropbox app running on your computer.  (If people would like instructions on this, reply in a comment, and I'll dig out what I did.

1. Make sure the iPad is on the network.
2. Drag the relevant scores to the Dropbox folder.
3. From inside forScore click on the Toolbox icon.
4. Under "Add Scores" click on Dropbox
5. Pick the scores you want from the Dropbox folder.

Although this seems like almost as complicated an act, 5 steps, versus 7 steps, I just remember one thing:  "Use Dropbox as intermediary."  Because there's only one Dropbox folder, I don't go through the complicated mess of remembering where to find the place inside iTunes to drop my application-specific data.

Bottom line:  By trying to eliminate the complexity of a hierarchical filesystem, but desiring to have a specific landing point for particular application data, file sharing has become too complicated.  The remedy is to take a step back and say, "Let's have a generic rendez-vous point where sender and receiver can still think simply within their mindset."

Does this make sense, Gentle Reader?  What do you think?

-Poetnerd

Reading on the iPad Part 9: Forbes Revisited: Still a bit of a disappointment.

I originally wrote about the experience of Forbes magazine on the iPad back in August 2011. Slightly more than a year and a half later, there is news to report: There is now a Forbes iPad app, but it is not as good as what was available from others a year ago.

I opened my original review of Forbes on the iPad mentioning that they had written excitedly in July 2010 of big changes at Forbes embracing the digital age. But the focus seems to have stayed almost exclusively with content production rather than dissemination. It has taken until 2013 for Forbes to offer a bona fide, "Forbes on the iPad experience."

The nitty gritty:

In comparison to the previous iPad Forbes experiences of the web site, which sacrificed the magazine layout and the otherwise excellent article ordering, and Forbes via the Kindle which pretty much sacrificed everything except the barest of article content and a few color plates, the Forbes iPad app is a dramatic improvement.

However, in comparison to what was available from others more than a year ago, it is a disappointing also-ran. It that lacks functionality, robustness, and even page turning speed. I hope the folks of mazdigital.com are listening.

Lets go to the basic four criteria I used for all the other apps:

• Did the reader offer a good, "turn all the pages" interface when I wanted it?
• Did the publication offer a good table of contents summary and easy fetch when I wanted it?
• Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?
• Was the interface familiar, sensible, and obvious?

At first glance, the app meets these four criteria. I can turn all the pages. The table of contents is an augmented version of the print magazine's table of contents that enables me to just tap on the article I want to read. There does not seem to be a big delay in rendering and displaying content. The interface is indeed familiar, sensible and obvious.

The interface and behavior is most similar to the qmags interface I reviewed in Part 5. A bit-for-bit rendering of the print edition is augmented with links to other areas of the magazine, additional media, and external content. With the "grow" and "pinch" gestures, one can zoom in and out. The zoom behaves a little strangely in the landscape mode (which shows two pages side by side). Your first "grow" gesture will only expand one of the two pages to a full width. You can enlarge bigger after that in a second gesture, but it's a little more coarse grained that I liked. Still, the rendering is quite fast, perhaps because of this coarse control.

I very much liked how, unlike pretty much every other magazine reading app I've thus far reviewed, the Forbes app gave me a page number indication when I tapped to get to the control interface. Seeing page X of Y at the top is most welcome! The scrollbar provided page thumbnails only when it was manipulated. This too seemed like a superior interface to having them always present.

One feature I would have liked is the overview interface offered in the Wired and Fast Company apps which would let me scan through the articles in a grid.

A feature I desperately needed was a bookmark capability. Now we get to one of the two aspects of the app that made it so disappointing: When I'd pick up reading after a couple days hiatus, the app forgets where I left off!

I often find myself putting a magazine down in the middle of reading and not coming back for a couple days. With the Forbes app, regularly forgot where I left off. This also happens with the qmags app, and I really need to file a bug report with both qmags and mazdigital. No app is immune to crashes, and whenever this one crashes, my location in the magazine is always lost. With the other apps, I work around this by setting a book mark. With no bookmarking capability, I just lose.

The second source of disappointment came with a subtle aspect of, "Was the content in front of me when I wanted to read it or did I have to wait?" With all the other apps, I've gotten into the habit of flicking through pages VERY fast to skip through content I do not want to read. Sadly there is some kind of delay to page turning in the Forbes app that keeps me from turning pages even as fast as I can turn them in the paper edition.

The subscription / business model:

This area continues to be one with a variety of approaches on offer. As of today:

• The Economist generously provides a free iPad feed to all print subscribers.
• Wired also offers a free iPad feed to print subscribers but is still saddled with the bizarre cost model (perhaps imposed by Apple) that an iPad-only subscription costs more than a print subscription that includes the iPad feed.
• Fast Company offers the online version free to print subscribers.
• With the IEEE, but I have two publications as online-only at no extra charge, and one that is dual print and online at no extra charge.
• The Wall Street Journal offers online-only at a discount.

When the Forbes app first became available, only the purchase of individual issues and new subscriptions on the iPad was available. Because of early (and subsequently corrected) misbehavior of the app, I was in an angry mood when I contacted Forbes complaining of "trouble" with my subscription, saying that it looked like I was being offered cancellation of my print subscription and starting over as the way to access the iPad edition, and how upset I was that Forbes chose that model in contrast to what Wired, and The Economist did.

The reply I received said that the iPad edition would be available $10 for print subscribers, but that the current issue was available for free.

While I appreciate that production of the iPad edition involves additional costs to add the links and the additional media, I like to believe that going paperless is something to be encouraged, and that the right model at the present time is to get the online edition at no extra cost.

I suspect Forbes may have gotten many angry notes from people like me protesting against the additional charge, because when I went to try out the app, the system told me that I was one of a select group of loyal subscribers who could have the iPad edition at no extra cost. (I have been a subscriber since the 80s.) 

Conclusions:

I now read Forbes primarily on the iPad, so the app is pretty good. However I find the slow page turning, and the losing of my place frustrating, and I always think less of Forbes for these limitations in comparison to what I get with the apps on offer for Wired, The Economist and IEEE Spectrum.

To make this a truly stellar and best of breed app I see only three changes necessary:

• Add a bookmark facility.
• Let me flip through the pages as fast as I want.
• Give me the overview interface.

I'd also suggest some more time spent testing and debugging the app. Sometimes the app just crashes, and I lose my place in the reading. The app can get confused as to what to render when one switches between landscape and portrait mode while zoomed. (Still, this is better than Fast Company's app which still is portrait only. Boo!)

I'd give a single bit of advice to anyone considering offering their print publication on the iPad: 

Try the Wired app. It sets the standard against which you will be measured.

Epilog:

I used the "Send Feedback" function inside the Forbes iPad app to let the folks of mazdigital.com know that I'd published a review.  The CEO replied thanking me for the detailed review and said that it would be taken into consideration as they evolve the platform.  So indeed they are listening.