I am now a proud iPad 2 owner. When the new one was announced, it was pretty much a done deal (and no, I didn’t have a first generation one). I sold my old MacBook and moved into the touch. One of the things I wanted to get it for was reading, so I started with the magazines.

I have a problem with magazines… what do you do with them afterwards? I no longer have a fine collection of PC World magazines from 1997 through to 2002 when I let the subscription expire, and they just gathered dust. I’m a hoarder, but not of magazines. If the iPad had reading in its future, how did it stack up and would I want to save trees with it?

After a week, I’ve tried four different magazine readers. None of them are perfect, but a couple of them are close. Let’s look!

Atomix

My first magazine purchase was Atomix, the first video game magazine geared towards the iPad. My history of video game magazines goes only to New Zealand Official PlayStation Magazine for the free demo disks that came with it (although, “free” as in, “I paid $16 for this so damn right I get a CD with it”).

Atomix is a well-done magazine. A collaborative effort between Atomix Magazine in Mexico, and Area 5 in the US, with (currently) 50% of content produced specifically for the magazine itself by Area 5. They hope to increase this to about 70-80% in the future. You swipe left and right to go between articles, featured articles have beautiful “cover” images and sometimes animations. You then scroll to read the story.

Rotate the iPad to landscape mode to view a beautiful gallery of images related to the article – but this isn’t the case for every article. There are interactive elements, such as touching cables to see the best video output, as well as video. The first issue has a three part series on iOS gaming and their future, the quality was great.

My only issue was the downloader. The magazine comes in at 420MB, and the software is rather new. If your iPad locks, or you go into another app, you’re going to have to restart the download from the beginning again. They’ve promised a fix in the future, but it seems leaving the app open to download is a curse with all magazine apps. Each issue is a steal at $1.29.

Project, Wired and Zinio at the jump!
Continue reading…

OK, OK, I’ll admit it. I screwed up! I thought I’d take this blog to Tumblr and everything would be awesome… I’d post more, I’ll be able to bring more of personality to it, etc etc.

But that experiment clearly failed.

So here I am, again, the third time, reviving this blog. What a nightmare… OK it wasn’t. The Tumblr is going to be there for old times sake, but the new blog, situation right here on blog.daniels.net.nz will replace it – forever! No more Tumblr!

However, I hit a stub. It seems in an effort to move my Tumblr stuff over to this blog, it screwed up my database. So here I am, back at square one. I’ll slowly import the old posts one by one, they’re still around on my local install of WordPress so they aren’t gone forever.

I won’t be one to post all the time (obviously), but when I do, I hope it’ll be worthwhile. So, what have I done here then?

It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s HTML5+CSS3 in harmony!

Last time I did my blog, I said that it’s HTML5 compliant… by only changing the Doctype. This time around I went all out.

For starters, the layout is all HTML5 syntax… yup, you have your headers, articles, sections. You name it! Thanks to the great Dev.Opera article on using them correctly.

The CSS being used utilises a lot of CSS3. If you take a poke, transitions, transforms, shadows, rounded corners. It’s enough to make IE6 scream… if only it knew what it was it was screaming about it. Then there are the fonts, from the Google Font Library comes Bevan for the headings and PT Sans for the main body text. I’m not a font guru, (or maybe I am), but I quite like them. You may get a flash of unstyled text as they get loaded in.

What’s more, the CSS was done using the fantastic SASS utility, that’s Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets. It’s really made developing and debugging the CSS a joy, so why not give it a shot?

That’s it from me. Enjoy the rest of your night, or day, or morning, or… whatever.