One of the UK’s Mac magazines, MacFormat, which I regularly write for, just unleashed its new digital version on the App Store. On the iPad, it uses the same underlying framework as the spiffy Tap! magazine, making for an entertaining and interactive experience. Hurrah! So, inevitably, people are already bitching about it on the App Store. Here are two choice one-star reviews:

4.99 for a digital version? They are pricing themselves out of the digital magazine market! I have contacted them personally about the pricing structure before. However they have not replied and seemingly not interested in what I have to say.

Gosh, I wonder why?

No paper cost, No press cost, No postage cost and it is £44.99
NO THANKS
If I subscribe the magazine version I get the magazine and the downloadable pdf to read on any computing device including iPad, now tel me why digital iPad version is so pricy. Yo must think Whether you are too cleaver or iPad users are so stupid.

Yeah, those MacFormat guys think they are far too ‘cleaver’ for us mere mortals, taking our cash and rolling around naked on £50 notes, laughing maniacally. Or perhaps, just perhaps, digital magazines actually cost money to produce too? Maybe, when it comes down to it, paper/printing/mailing isn’t actually such a massive chunk of production costs as wages, paid to the people that plan, write and edit each edition? Just possibly, there’s the teeny tiny issue of interactive content (videos, touch interfaces, ‘3D’ photography elements) actually taking time and therefore costing money to create? And, clearly, being a quid cheaper for a single issue than on the newsstand (or two-quid if you take out the rolling one-month subscription) is just wrong, too. At the very most, the magazine should obviously be free, because it’s created by magic editorial elves, who don’t need to eat and pay their mortgages. Really, MacFormat should be paying us a crisp tenner every time we download an issue, because, man, we paid for this expensive iPad hardware and, DAMMIT, we are entitled! We deserve free things! We don’t understand how magazines work and that people need to be paid! And so on!

Also, just to prove they’re entirely evil, MacFormat’s also gone half-price for a short period of time, giving you single issues for £2.49 and a year’s subscription for £24. Those utter, utter bastards.

UPDATE: I’m informed by MacFormat’s production editor that the half-price offer only relates to the current issue, which is £1.49 instead of £2.99. The £24 subscription—that’s a permanent deal, but wasn’t reflected in App Store details when the new issue went live.  Naturally, some people are still complaining that figure’s too high.

One of the things that currently annoys a lot of people about Apple is the way in which it constantly builds apps that resemble real-world items. iBooks has a background that resembles an open book, and Apple’s calendaring apps have leather stitching and torn paper at the top. In some cases, such design merely irks designers who like the minimalism Apple showcases in its hardware; occasionally, though, usability suffers. For example, the iBooks background never changes, and so while you can instinctively look at a real book and see how much is left to go, iBooks doesn’t help in this way; worse, Address Book for OS X apes a real book and ends up a total mess that’s far slower to work with than its predecessor.

Of late, a lot of people have been pointing to Microsoft as the superior company when it comes to interface design, citing the mostly very smart Windows 7 and Windows 8. The problem is, not all interface design scales, and when you go very minimal, interfaces can lose any sense of tactility and make it hard to focus. Peter Bright of Ars Technica’s shot of Office 2013 highlights that the opposite of Apple’s current design aesthetic isn’t necessarily any better. Acres of white space lead the eye to flick all over the design, making it hard to focus on the content (which is the smallish box on the right, with “This is an inline reply” in it). It’s unclear which components are buttons and which are content areas. Worse, there’s no sense of warmth at all. This feels like an email client designed to appeal to people bereft of emotion. In short, it’s every bit as horrible as Apple’s worst UI design, just in a very different way.

Although it at the time of writing only has 260 backers, the GameDock for iPhone, iPad and iPod is over 80 per cent of the way to funding its Kickstarter project. As hard as I try, I just don’t get the point of the device. I last year wrote about iOS controllers, which at the time were fragmenting wildly. Today, the majority of controllers are iCade compatible, and yet the devices I’ve tested still exhibit massive fragmentation, largely due to the manner in which buttons are mapped.

Much of the reason for this is down to the original iCade’s set-up: a joystick and eight action buttons. Developers made their own decisions regarding which buttons mapped to which controls. You therefore find some games work with the left-most buttons and some with the right-most ones. For the original iCade and iCade Core, this doesn’t matter a great deal. The worst-case scenario is one rapidly aborted game with your on-screen guy getting killed as you figure out which buttons equate to jump and fire. iCade-compatible mobile devices, such as the iCade Mobile and Gametel aren’t nearly so lucky. With only four action buttons, many games become unplayable, substantially reducing the already smallish compatible selection. (Games aren’t automatically compatible with iCade—developers must specifically add support.)

The GameDock further reduces the number of action buttons to two, and so it’ll be a small miracle if many games work well with it. Additionally, the controllers are clearly modelled on NES controllers, which is a pretty good way to get sued by Nintendo, and the entire system is based around wires. You plug a wire from the GameDock into the TV, for video output, and the controllers plug into the dock itself. This might be kitsch and retro, but it also feels like a step back. To my mind, the future for iOS and gaming remains AirPlay and the Apple TV. It’s still not there yet—it’s too common to get just enough lag for games to feel wrong—but it makes more sense to me to use this system than one so solidly rooted in the 1980s.

I yesterday wrote about Tap! magazine, largely about the editor’s belief that you can’t just review iOS apps in a few minutes. However, he also showed off the accelerometer-aware cover. Sure enough, one of the commenters got all angry about this:

It’s “accelerometer aware”…. who actually gives a **** about this? It “organically appears” … please, just show the damn content! What a bunch of pretentious bollocks.

One of the best things about Tap! is the manner in which the team has experimented with a new medium. Sure, you don’t need to have an accelerometer-aware cover. Similarly, last issue, the in-house guys didn’t need to animate my Plants vs. Zombies How To Win feature and Graham Barlow’s cover feature on apps and games for kids. But these things are nice-to-haves (similar to—although not identical to—layout flourishes in print magazines that go beyond pure readability), and Chris Phin in the video comes across like a proud craftsman, showing off his team’s work, the result of their trying new things and experimenting with a nascent medium.

Sure, the video could have just flipped through every page, which would have been boring as hell, much in the same way Tap! could have reformatted itself as ‘Instapaper with pictures’, which wouldn’t have been nearly as appealing as a magazine that begs to be interacted with and that’s trying to do something new rather than remain rooted in the past of magazines and newspapers.

Editor Chris Phin previews the latest edition of Tap! magazine on YouTube, but along with showing what’s inside, he also provides some thinking on iOS reviews in general:

It actually really annoys me when I see people reviewing iOS apps badly. It’s easy to just read an App Store description and tag on a mealy-mouthed, not very definitive verdict at the end of that.

This is something that I’m finding’s becoming increasingly common. I’ll often see reviews of iOS games and apps that make judgment calls that only relate to a few minutes’ use. In Tap!, Chris notes that we don’t do this (I’m the games editor, as regular readers here will know), spending hours with games and apps, to make sure we provide a verdict that comes from extended use, not just a quick look. In some cases—*cough*Hero Academy*cough*—we perhaps spend a bit too much time on a single product, but there you go.

Still, this isn’t the only thing that annoys me from a Tap! perspective. People still bang on about magazines being rubbish on the iPad (something I wrote about in March) and, more recently, argue the iPad’s corner in terms of content creation. Bizarrely, Tap! almost never gets a mention, despite being a magazine designed specifically for the iPad and that’s actually put together on an iPad and in the iPad simulator on a Mac. (More on Tap!’s creation can be found in this YouTube video.)

It frustrates me that Tap! isn’t more well known, but delights me when I receive feedback from readers, which is almost universally positive. If you own an iPad and fancy checking out Tap!’s reviews, features, and the developer section (by the amazingly talented Matt Gemmell), grab a copy from http://tapm.ag/appedition. Individual issues are three quid, but there are a also a few previews that let you try before you buy.