Great magazine, poor implementation – Rue Morgue Review

First I should make it clear that I love (LOVE) Rue Morgue magazine, the content and quality of writing is consistently top notch and the design is impeccable (a rarity in the genre and all the more remarkable for it). I've been eagerly awaiting this app for a couple of months, and the results are disappointing. It's tragic to see the promise of magazine publishing on the iPad fail due to shoddy implementation, much as 3D was once hailed as the savior of the film industry only to wither under an onslaught of retro-fitted cash-ins. I thought that Zinio's lazy port of their desktop app was the low point of this particular genre, but I'm sorry to say that my favorite magazine has sunk even lower. This is basically a PDF (which is something we've wearily grown used to), made worse by the inclusion of blue and red outlines added over the top of ad art and hot links. The reduced size means that reading at full page view is a challenge, but the enlarged view lags as it adjusts resolution and a side swipe is more likely to take you to the next page than the next column. Even glossing over the fact that second issue accepted payment but refuses to download, this has to be classed as a huge missed opportunity and we can only hope that Adobe's recent announcement of their digital magazine tools (which should put more control in the hands of any publisher willing to fork out the $700 monthly subscription fee) will allow for more device-appropriate re-purposing, a consequent increase in readership and the ability to monetize that content.
Review by garethwa1 on Rue Morgue.