Aside – the stunning HTML5 Magazine for iPad

Magazines for iPad or News on iPad

I decided to have a look at the subject of Magazines on the iPad because of getting an email which told me about Aside. The email came in from Graphic.com and the headline is all about HTML 5. They have built this magazine for reading on the iPad using the new flavour of html that will take over all new web pages in time. I am impressed by this html5 iPad magazine.

All you have to do to get the magazine on the iPad is to go to the web page in Safari and there is a pointer on the page to tell you which button to press in Safari to add the Magazine to the home screen of the iPad. I didn’t know you could do that and it works great. I did as I was told and not I have an icon for Aside that I can click on to open the Magazine direct.

When you open Aside Magazine it looks like another application. It is not like viewing a web page in the browser and it looks very tasty. What is comes down to is design and looking good, photos and text combined is a very specific way. None of this re flowing of text to suit different sizes of page. This is Desktop Publishing proper, a designer has decided the look and feel of a page as would happen with a magazine on a news stand. The only thing different in this concept is that each page has to have two designs so that the portrait and landscape modes are taken care of.

WOW! I am so impressed!

I just opened it to confirm the previous paragraph and yes that is the case with the portrait and landscape. What just impressed me with Aside html5 though was a page that has four photos on it. When you touch one of the photos it zooms itself into the foreground and looks incredible. I did it by accident first but there is a bit of text to say ‘Tap to Enlarge’. I just love it.

Double WOW!

It gets even better. On the next page there is a 3D ugly looking squirrel that actually can be rotated, that is spun in 3D space by sliding my finger on the screen. It is fantastic, this interactivity which I wasn’t expecting to find at all. I though there would be multi media in there such as a bit of audio or a tap to play a movie but this is certainly new and cool.

Navigating Pages in Aside Magazine

To move from page to page it is the usual swipe from left to right and then if the page is longer, such as the page with a short story, you can swipe from bottom to top to have the page scroll. There is an image in the bottom left corner of a page curl. Tapping on that brings up a table of contents on the left side of the screen. There is an small image and a wee bit of text for each page.

Tap to go to the page. You do have to wait just a short while when the page loads, depends on the speed of your internet how quick it is. Once it has been loaded then the next time you go to the page it is there waiting for you. You close the app and it is gone requiring a reload, so you would want to do this over Wifi and not over 3G. Even if they have optimised the graphics for iPad and by using HTML5 kept it all a manageable size in megabytes.

Magazine Has Hot Links

The magazine has hot links to take you to other pages, there are similar small buttons that will link you to a web page outside of the magazine and buttons you can press to change a picture in some places on the page. It also changes the text beside the picture to suit the image too. Aside  html5 also has a page with music that you can play, iPad audio, with a button to start and stop the sounds. It doesn’t do pause though on this one, it is probably possible though.

There is a Blending the Bunny page with a movie which started playing and then stopped to do the reloading. Only took a short time, less than a minute to load and played beautifully. Even possible to go full screen with it. Looks brilliant with HTML5 iPad being used.

When I started to write this I thought I would have to write in here about other magazines that you can get on the iPad like Wired and newspapers like the New York Times and Zinio which is a free proper application that sells the electronic versions of the magazines that you can buy from the news shops in the high street. I didn’t realise how awesome Aside HTML5 Magazine was going to be with its use of the new web language. I now want to go and learn HTML5 now for myself and create something like this. I am that impressed and this is going to be brilliant for authors and writers.