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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Smithsonian Turns Magazine Into Touch Museum on iPadThursday, February 9, 2012 Venerable print brand and legendary museum Smithsonian meets the shiny new object. Smithsonian magazine yearns  to become something closer to a living museum as it finally brings its monthly title to the iPad in a fully enhanced edition. Selling for $3.99 an issue or by subscription for $19.99/yr or $1.99/month, the monthly is also accessible to subscribers for free on their iPad. While January and February issues currently are ready for download in the app, the publisher wisely gives away the December issue as a full sample of what the brand has in store on the tablet platform.Smithsonian on iPad is designed for landscape viewing. It uses the wide screen to create an immersive effect. The text often is kept sparse on screens with larger images, all the better to fall into the masterful artwork. The text formatting is very readable. Many articles include embedded slideshows, but the object is not to overwhelm with touch mechanics. Instead the design simply fits the iPad screen well. The split screen effect often fits a good complement of text in a scrolling window to the left and puts a small slide show complement on the right rail. This doesn’t always work out well, as we found several instances where the text scrolling window was a tad too narrow for comfort and the extended captions in some images were too small for easy reading. In fact, overall, the captions were too small and probably would have worked well as tappable pop-ups. The slideshow operation also is not consistent. At times we see thumbnails of available images you tap to see in full view and in another instance you are prompted to tap the main image to advance to another slide. There is another instance where the text adjacent to an image requires a lateral rather than a vertical swipe to advance. Again, our thinking is to pick an interactive nomenclature and stick with it. Every article has email, Facebook and Twitter sharing links. We were puzzled by the email function, which kicked the user out of the app to send the message. Luckily, the Smithsonian apps is well behaved in iPad multitasking, so you can switch back to where you left off. But it hardly seems a necessary interruption at all since most other apps embed the email function more seamlessly. But we quibble. Smithsonian adds multimedia judiciously, and without overwhelming the app. We like the audio content, including Hawaiian native singing and narrative as well as a 90-second video. The video that is in this issue genuinely adds to the richness of the story. Generally, the magazine knows where its strong suits are in this regard, bringing the authenticity of the subject to the fore with beautiful images and genuinely informative audio tracks. Getting to watch sperm whales dance beneath the waves is just stunning, for instance. Listening to the subjects of stories tell their own tales in their own voice is where the app turns into the kind of experience one would expect from the brand that is associated with one of the great museum systems of the world. They understand that content is not just read and watched but experienced. As an app, Smithsonian for iPad is not a revelation in any way. But it marries well the mission and expertise of the brand with the platform to create a satisfying experience.  If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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