3 Insights on the Popular Science iPad App

At first, reading a magazine on the iPad was a novel experience for me. I work on a print magazine, and most of the reading I do outside of work is on paper. Still, I got accustomed to the Popular Science magazine app relatively quickly. It turns out that reading the app on the iPad isn’t really all that different from reading the magazine in print. A few design quirks notwithstanding, the app successfully translates the magazine from the printed page to the touch screen.

Finding Your Way

To start with, navigating through the app is fairly straightforward and intuitive. Aside from the standard finger-swipe method of flipping through pages, you can also bring up a table of contents at any time to jump to an article. Helpful arrows guide you through the magazine’s features and tell you when to scroll down for more content. And there’s an unobtrusive progress meter that keeps you oriented in the magazine and lets you know how much you have left to read.

The Reading Experience

Reading the articles on the app is, at least at first, a little tricky. A helpful “How to use this app” page explains that the text and the images are on separate “layers” and can therefore move independently of each other. One way to think about this is that the images (i.e., the magazine’s photographs and illustrations) are on a background layer, and the text layer is superimposed on top of the image layer. Tap anywhere on the screen and the text disappears, leaving only the images; tap again and the text reappears.

This layered presentation takes some getting used to, but it’s actually a pretty clever way of presenting the magazine’s content. When you’re reading, say, a short article on a new high-tech nail gun, you can scroll through all the text while the photograph of the nail gun in the background stays still, allowing you to continually glance over at the device’s features as those features are mentioned in the text. You never have to scroll back up to see the image that the text is referring to. This makes the experience more like reading a magazine and less like reading a website. The downside to this approach is that the column of scrollable text takes up about half of the screen and partially obscures the image behind it. But you can always tap the screen for an unobstructed view of the image and then tap it again to get the text back.

More Than a Magazine?

Once you get used to the layered text and images, swiping through the app is very much like flipping through the printed version of the magazine. If anything, the whole experience is a little bit too much like reading the print edition, because it doesn’t offer much in the way of digital extras. None of the URLs are active links; tapping them just makes them disappear, along with the rest of the text. There is no way to share an article via email or social media—although a video on the Popular Science website (popsci.com) about the app suggests that such sharing tools, along with other interactive features, are forthcoming. And there are no videos or other multimedia features. There really isn’t any content in the app that you can’t get from the print edition. The app basically repackages the content for viewing on the iPad. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. After all, the iPad is at least in part an e-reader, and this app is a good way to read the magazine and take it with you wherever you go. I suspect, however, that some people will want more digital bells and whistles, so it will be interesting to see what future updates bring to this well-executed magazine app.

Posted By: Ben Fromson