Review: Newsweek for iPad. Pleh.
Two days ago we downloaded the free Newsweek for iPad app, along with their special free trial issue designed to entice us to buy the real thing. It was laughably bad. We couldn’t stop passing it around from hand to hand to marvel at its slapdash, amateurish, awfulness.
Newsweek launched its app over the holiday weekend, and created an image-heavy, ad-free, issue about the Obama presidency to show off its iPad bells and whistles. In theory, the idea was to show readers how fabulous magazines will look on the iPad, and the issue was made up entirely of old photos of Obama, old Obama cartoons, some captions, and one letter from the editor crooning a love song to Steve Jobs, “the Gutenberg of a new age.” Not a terrible idea, in theory.
In practice, it didn’t occur to anyone that they needed high-res images to pull this off. It looks like they took some old stock photos they had lying around, licensed at a lower-res for web use, and stuck them in their iPad mag. The photos look horrible. They’re a blurry mess. And that’s before zooming in with the neat iPad pinch function. Do that, and they really fall apart.
And that’s assuming you can even get them to load – there’s a black screen and a “loading” animation every time we turn a page. Well, advance to the next page using the thumbnails at the bottom, because there’s no easy way to advance by tapping on the side of the page or turning the corner, like you would with an iBook. The loading takes so long, it has made the iPad hang a couple times. AND, the thumbnails are so small, there’s no way to browse content and know what you’re turning to in advance. There’s not even a table of contents, interactive or otherwise. They even screwed up the kerning on one caption so that the letters overlap. I’d show you, but there’s no way to share or take a screenshot or anything.
I’m still hopeful that smart use of this thing by publishers will help imagemakers by revitalizing the market for our work, and I’m excited to check out the new Wired for iPad later this week. For now, I’m actually embarrassed for Newsweek. I hope other publishers get their magazines really ready for this rather than rushing them to market, because the last thing we need is for the public to turn away from this before it has a chance to realize its potential.
-michelle
