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This article was posted on May 17, 2011 under the category Reviews, and covers the following topics: App, iPad, Late Autumn, Letter to Jane, Moral Tales, Time Moore.
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It’s not secret that I was a big fan of Tim Moore‘s first full-on foray into the iPad magazine scene — Letter to Jane: Late Autumn — and you can bet I was excited at the prospect of a new issue of this quartely indie mag coming out, and now here we have it. The third issue takes on the subtitle of “Moral Tales,” and sees Tim expanding on what he achieved with the previous issue.
I’ll just go out and say that you should absolutely go buy it, but here are a few thoughts on what the issue looks like.
First off, we get a different kind of welcome page/cover — what you see initially is pictured above, and double tapping brings up the black-and-white image you see on the left, which invites you to watch a lovely intro video to the issue. It’s not only a better way to incorporate video as your cover element — I’m not so crazy about video covers that immediately start playing every time you open the page — and it acts as an elegant buffer, to get you in the proper mindspace to start taking in the content found inside.
I also like the way he’s divited content, grouping articles in chapters, which also includes a prologue. Although I’m not entirely sure how the content thematically ties together that way, it feels like a nice directed packaging of pieces, and works even as just a suggested reading session.
The articles themselves are presented in a way similar to what we saw in the previous issue — you swipe the article’s “pages” over a static background image. To go to the next article, you touch the heading in the upper right hand corner. In the upper left hand corner, you are shown your current chapter, and touching it opens up a sub-menu that lets you move to a different one. At the bottom, you’ll find all of the sharing buttons, and touching “Online” will open up a sub-menu to the side that offers a few links, like website and videos.
Double tapping the page hides all those control elements — if you use the iA Writer app on iPad, you’ll be familiar with the idea of a “focus” mode, that lets you get rid of all distracting elements, and it certainly works here.
As with the previous issue, you can again access a pure text version of all the articles (pictured above) that simplies the navigation by making it a full-scroll — it also let’s you change the text size, and you can select/copy any text.
I also like the way he incorporates the Twitter sharing window — it’s completely in keeping with the aesthetic of the magazine.
Another improvement this time around is the way the photo galleries are presented. While in the previous issue all galleries were full-page, you would sometimes get a gallery that made you turn your iPad to landscape mode (it should be said that Letter to Jane is portrait-only in terms of reading). This time around, every single photo has been cropped to fit the screen in portrait mode, yet you still have the option of going through the gallery seeing the full images (smaller size, with black bars to fill the space). Double tapping again removes all navigation elements, but I do rather like how those controls (like options accessing text and website) look on the page, as they really don’t interfere with the photos.
But this comes at a price — although the white text works great for the vast majority of the photos, there are a few here and there (like the example above) where the strong white in the photo itself ends up hiding those controles. But this isn’t much of a complaint, considering that this happens to but one photo in a gallery, and so it’s not like you have lost complete access to those elements.
This issue not only introduces video content (and there’s more than just that video intro), there’s also a track you can listen to for one of the featured bands in the issue (Shadows on Stars). As you can see above, in keeping with the simplicity found throughout, you access the track with one button, and it will continue to play even while you flip through the pages of the article, something I wish more magazines would do.
Again, as I said at the top, I think this is a great example of how a magazine can and should work on the iPad, and if anything, I just wish it was a monthly instead of a quarterly — but considering it’s a one-man operation, I can accept that. You should also note that although the previous issue sold for $1, this issue comes in at $2, which is still a great price for all of the content you’re getting, especially considering that it’s an independent production.
Update: Tim writes about the making of the issue in this long post.