Zinio - I like it.

One of the apps I decided to try out based on somebody else's recommendation was Zinio. It is a magazine reader much like iBooks is book reader. There is a fairly wide variety of magazines available, but not as complete as I would like. They do offer a few complimentary issues which allows you to check out the experience without having to subscribe to anything. The app itself is free.

I browsed through the compliementary issues and was impressed enough that I have subscribed to a two. The text clarity is excellent, images are good as well. These magazines are more than just the print version render in electronic form. The ones I have explored have embedded videos, and slide shows. It is generally an engaging reading experience.

One quibble have will point out is the app is not the most stable. I have found it to crash about every 10 to 15 minutes. Long enough between crashes to be tolerated but definitely annoying. Fortunately it does a pretty good job of saving where you left off when you restart the application.

I have not done much to explore oth magazine readers. Have you? If you have found a good one leave a comment to let us know.

Thoughts on iBooks

Perhaps it is because my iTunes account is Canadian, but I have found the content a available on the iBooks store to be very disappointing. Close to useless for anything except old classics. I need to read some of them anyhow. Hands down the selection on Amazon is way better. However, I do think that iBooks is a better book reader than kindle. Oh well. The kindle read works quiet well, but iBooks just has a little extra polish.

What kind of polish? The bookmarks are nice as is the position within chapter and book. It seems less abstract than kindle. The page turn animation gets a lot of oohs and aaahs, but I am not so sure how much better it really makes the reading experience.

The one thing I really like is iBooks PDF feature. I have tons of PDFs; manuals, books, articles that I either want to read, or would like to have handy. A great example of a manual I have placed in ibooks is the manual for my camera.

Do you have a dropbox account? If you don't consider getting one. The drop box app makes it really easy to grab a PDF from drop box and then add it to iBooks. Slick. Get your own account here.[full disclosure - if you use that link I will benefit by getting more space. So please use it ;-)]

One big question remains - i mentioned it awhile ago when I wrote about the kobo. Just how many electronic bookshelves do you want to manage. I think I would prefer one shelf, connected to the amazon store which I could read with iBooks. Unlikely in the short term I think.

One improvement I would like to see to iBooks itself is a better way to manage a large collection of books.

Flash - my verdict

Much has been written about this by others so I'll just recap my experience. Are there websites I visit that use flash as an essential part of the site's purpose? Yes. Would I like to visit them on my iPad? Yes. So, if they want me to visit, they'd better change. I think that goes for my 20-something children as well, who want to borrow my iPad rather than hauling out their laptop.

Ironically of the the sites that I really wanting to use, bad enough to go to my windows machine is the Adobe store. It is all Flash based. (and not well designed either, but that is another story). I have been unable to complete my order there, I may buckle and actually call customer service, but only because I want the product sooner rather than later. If it had been available on amazon for immediate ship, it would have been bought already, and done from my iPad.

New family member - welcome iPad

I finally broke and bought an iPad. My rationale is that it does appear to be defining a new class of device and even though the next version will be much improved, I needed to understand the device now. For me that means using one as much as I can. Those who know me know that I will use it heavily for as much as I can.

I have had it now for a week; 32GB wifi. My rationale for the size was that it was bigger than my 16GB touch, and I could save a few dollars over the 64 model. Wifi only as I anticipated that if I really need mobile data access I would get a MiFi. I was also hoping that I would be able to pickup the hydro-one wifi signal from my desk. They offer an iPad data service for $5 per month. Unfortunately, I have not been able to make that work. Free open access does exist in many places downtown so generally am not too bad off. I think I will still miss the gps function.

I also purchased the dock, the VGA cable and the camera connection kit. The later because I hope to experiment with it as a tool for photographers as well.

So far the experience has been good. There was a good chance of it's new life with me when it was not available. Maybe I should have ordered two - or three. It has been very popular with the family.

That should be a good start. Of course this is all written on the iPad itself using the blogger web application. Works well.