Remember the problems Esquire encountered this month in releasing its latest issue on iPad? Looks like as long as your content involves topless women that you can spin around 360 degrees, then Apple is A-OK with it — as seen in the amazing new feature included in The Sun‘s iPad app. (via Grids)

I’ve been meaning to do a write-up on The Times‘ iPad version of its monthly Eureka science magazine for way too long now, and please don’t think that it’s because I don’t think it’s good. In fact — and as Jeremy also quite plainly stated in his review — quite the contrary, as I think it’s one of the best iPad magazine releases so far.

What’s especially impressive is that I find this magazine to be interesting even though I normally would not be inclined to pick up a magazine about science. But Eureka on iPad does so many cool things with the digital format that it’s worth picking up for that fact alone — and it’s ridiculous not too, since it’s also priced at a mere $1.

It all kicks off with a graphically pleasing table of contents that lets you quickly zoom into the different sections of the magazine, using an atomic structure-like layout that suits the theme perfectly. You can also move around to different sections with a pop-up guide on the bottom, which is similar to the ones used in the Times iPad app, but with a graphical touch up.

It also does an amazing job of using imagery to enhance articles, and as with more and more iPad magazines these days (and to be fair, it was something I first saw in the Times app), it uses the landscape mode for extra content, like detailed slideshows and the like. I wonder why so many UK-based publications are doing this, but so far it’s not really happening on the US side.

Without going into too many details, let’s just say that you’ll find beautiful layouts and fun interactive features throughout, and so it’s well worth picking for a look at what a true graphic-heavy iPad magazine can look like (as opposed to the farce that is the New York Magazine app). Sure, there are still certain issues — still no text manipulation, and no sharing tools — but there’s still a lot to like, and as I said earlier, at $1 you can certainly check it out for yourself.

Remember when there was a lot of ruckus around Apple’s decision to start refusing apps they deemed too sexy for the App Store? Well, now it’s hitting iPad editions of mainstream magazines, as it appears that the reason it’s taken so long for the latest issue of Esquire to come out on iPad — the “Sexiest Woman Alive 2010″ issue — is because of said sexiness. The inclusion of this video of Minka Kelly was too hot for Apple?

The issue is now out on the App Store, but no word on what was censored or removed in order to get it approved. Certainly doesn’t make me want to get it (nevermind that I wouldn’t pick it up anyway, since I still think $5 is too much of an asking price). (via @twitsplosion)

Now this is a very cool idea for an iPad book-related app:

In 1966 British artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques thereby creating an entirely new version. He titled his altered book A Humument. The first version of all 367 treated pages was published in 1973 since when it has been continuously revised and there have been three new editions. The Humument App has just been developed for the iPad by Tom Phillips, it combines the most recent 367 full-colour pages with an entirely novel interactive feature, The Oracle.

The Humument App was released today on the iTunes App Store, and sells for $8. (via @craigmod)

I was reading this piece at WWD on Adobe’s digital magazine initiative and the release of the new iPad edition of Martha Stewart Living (which uses the Adobe platform), and found this bit near the end rather interesting:

Adobe is now moving on to National Geographic.

When I reviewed the current National Geographic iPad app a while back — which is nothing more than a wrapper for its Zinio edition — I mentioned how disappointed I was that a magazine of that stature wouldn’t try to release something a bit more ambitious. Sounds like we’re going to get something along the lines of Wired after all.

A few days ago, The Washington Post released an iPad app that gives you access to all of the paper’s content. Like the New York Times app, it’s free for now (as long as you register), but while the NYT hasn’t come out and said exactly when it will start charging, the Washington Post free trial ends in early February.

It’s interesting to see how the Washington Post has approached doing a newspaper app. Instead of the NYT‘s pop-up window to access sections — the only way you can do so — and then page flips to browse through articles excerpts within those sections, the Post goes the scrolling route. Each section is laid out like the front page of a newspaper, and you scroll down to see the excerpts — tapping an article also brings you to scrollable text, instead of the NYT‘s pages. I particularly like how you just swipe to the side to go from section to section — it’s a much easier way to quickly move through them.

As with the NYT app, one of the star features is how it deals with multimedia content, and here it again does the NYT one better by combining all photos and videos on one page, all laid out to see (above) — there’s a lot of flipping involved in going through galleries and videos in the NYT app. It’s kinda funny how one of the iPad’s first great apps, The Guardian Eyewitness, now comes off as quite sad these days, with its measly one photo a day content update.

Another feature I like is that it has a “Read Later” button that lets you save articles for reading at a later time — unlike the NYT that keeps articles in sections for a couple of days (even a week sometimes), with the Washington Post you access that day’s paper.

Why does the New York Times iPad app still do the thing you see pictured above, which is having an article that is supposed to be pretty much just a slideshow that shows up in another section, but with no slideshow or link to it. It always annoyed me with the Editor’s Choice version of the app, and there’s no reason that this should still happen, since I’ve seen articles in various sections that include a link to a proper slideshow.

If I keep bringing up errors in the NYT app it’s because I actually really enjoy the content, and it’s part of my daily routine to read the news on it, and I just want it to be a better app and not do stupid things anymore.

Been meaning to mention this for a while now, but a few weeks ago EGM launched a Facebook app version of their weekly digital-only EGMi. The magazine itself hasn’t changed at all, it’s just a way to have it live inside Facebook — you can pop it out as you can on EGMi’s regular site.

What I’m really still waiting for is the release of the iPad edition, which is still only listed as “coming soon.” But from recent editorials, it does sound like a release may actually be just around the corner.

We’d been waiting for it for a while, and last week finally marked the release of the first iPad edition of Wired UK. I was especially interested in seeing what the team behind the UK spinoff would come up with in terms of layout and format — just how different or similar to the US edition — using the same Adobe digital tools.

The biggest change is that the magazine has decided to embrace the portrait layout exclusively, using the landscape mode to access any multimedia features (videos, slideshows, etc.)

There are certain exceptions, like the issue’s cover, as well as all of the ads found inside, and that does in fact make sense. Even when in landscape mode, you can flip through the pages and go from media section to media section, and so you still encounter the ads. When you hit articles that don’t have any extra content, you get the message pictured above.

Continuing with a look at some of the changes, you get a much more creative masthead — I really like the use of arrows to indicate the proper “chain of command” — and a “Contributors” page that not only looks good, but is interactive in a way that is fun and works quite well with the color mix used (you touch on a contributor’s photo to have the appropriate text appear in the colored segments).

But the real genius of the magazine is that idea of using the landscape mode to show off the media content, which means that all photos and videos appear in all their full-screen glory (there’s one video that was smaller, that I can remember), instead of as a tiny box which is part of the article layout. What is especially a joy to experience are the 360 degrees images, which are just stunning in full-screen, and something that only an iPad edition of a magazine could offer — twirling around the sets of Aardman Animations’ latest film is so much more satisfying and revealing than a series of photos could ever be.

But even the basic photo slideshows are great to take in, and not only can you flip through the images of the slideshow, but when you are in landscape mode, you’ll also flip through all of the multimedia content associated with an article. Going back to portrait mode brings you back to the article, and more precisely, to the part of the article (the “screen”) that is linked to the media content.

It can get a bit out of hand though, like in the case of the audio clip that accompanies the article below (which happens to be the cover feature of the US edition this month). Having to turn to landscape mode just to then tap a small button to activate a sound file isn’t necessary (in the US iPad edition, the button of the clip is simply included in the article).

This also brings up a problem I’ve had with sound clips in general with Wired, both US and UK — the fact that you can’t continue to navigate while the clip plays. For example, I don’t really want to stare at a “screen” while listening to a music clip, I’d rather like to move on to the next article.

The other thing that I was really interested to find out with the UK edition was just how different the content would be from the US edition — this becomes especially important with the iPad app, since it gives Wired UK a worldwide audience, which means they really need to offer something different than the “mother” edition. From what I saw in this issue, I’d say that the vast majority is new content, enough to justify the purchase — I think only 4-5 articles from the US edition were used.

For those articles that did come from the US edition, it was interesting to see how they were presented differently. Some just had simple layout changes, while others, like the piece below, not only appear with a completely different look, but the context for most of the content is different (like the inclusion of a column by Clive Thompson inside the main feature).

I was also happy to finally get to read Warren‘s regular column in the form that it should be read in — in magazine form, and not on the web. The topic was also certainly apropos for being included in the first iPad edition of the magazine (“Blogging isn’t dying, it’s just that people are bored with and looking for the next thing”).

I briefly mentioned earlier that ads appear in both portrait and landscape modes, but it also needs to be said that not only does there appear to be more ads than in the US edition — I would find myself having to flip through 2-3 ads between articles — but there are also more “Wired Promotion” pieces (i.e. advertorials). I know that in recent years I would see a lot of these in the print edition of Wired US, but so far the iPad edition hasn’t had too many (I believe just one). Here, we get a few of them, like the one below, which to me is just wasted space as I never read them.

And the ads for the most part don’t do much with the medium, but I did quite like the one you see below for The Times‘ iPad app, which plays a visual trick on the two iPad modes.

In many of my past reviews I’ve often stated how I prefer “screen” flips over scrolling, and Wired UK pretty much sticks with what we’re used to seeing in the US edition, making an exception in two pieces. I can see why they would go that way in their “Big Ideas for 2011″ feature, using a blog format similar to the front section of the iPad edition of Esquire — you can tap the sections in the sidebar to move to a new group of “ideas” — but I really don’t like that they have artificially put a space jump in the opening text of each section (as seen below) so that that “opening” screen looks nice and not cut.

They do the same in the article below, which has a fun interface — you touch on each subway stop to read what it’s about — but again they put an artificial space in the text, which just looks odd when you move or scroll the page up.

There are also strange bugs that they need to iron out — and let’s be clear, they do clearly explain in the intro that this is a test issue, and that they hope to get feedback and improve things for the upcoming issues that will start coming out in 2011. One thing I noticed was that when you have your iPad synced with your computer and you access the “File Sharing” section of iTunes, you can see the files that make up the issue — I’m sure this was not intended.

Also, since the release of the issue last week, they’ve been making updates to it, but that I can’t experience because they appear as separate issues (v.1.2, v1.3) inside the app that I need to buy. Surely this is a mistake.

Is it worth buying? I’d say yes, especially if you love the US edition. The price is the same ($4), and they have already announced that they are looking into offering subscription offers. They also promise that upcoming editions will include ways to share pages with others, which is a feature I’d love to see in the US edition as well. Give me the ability to interact with the text (copy/paste, notes, etc.) and I’ll be a pretty happy reader.

I leave you with the opening graphic to the app, which I think is much nicer than any of the ones that have appeared in the US edition.

The dangers of automating layouts and content, as exemplified this morning by this front page in the “World” section of the New York Times app for iPad.

Vogue UK for iPad has just been released, and as much as I’d like to get it so I can review here, I’m just not willing to pay the $7 asking price. Here then is a video that teases the issue that was “ninety four years in the making,” and I’m sure we can expect some impressions from Jeremy over at MagCulture soon enough.

And speaking of Jeremy, do take a look at his recent post covering this past week’s big title releases on iPad (New York Magazine, Wired UK, and Eureka). I’m late on my reviews of Wired UK and Eureka, but will try to have something up over the weekend (and I do pretty much agree with Jeremy’s views).

Let me also mention that I’m very open to getting some review copies of iPad magazines (download codes) to cover here — it’s getting expensive for me to properly review everything I’d like to cover.

Just the other week I was saying how much I’ve been enjoying various aspects of New York Magazine this year, and now we get the release of the official iPad edition. This would normally make me very happy, except for the fact that what we got is almost unforgiveable.

Let’s start with the good though. Interestingly enough, the app has launched with an in-app store that offers quite a few issues for sale already, going back to the June 14 issue (New York Magazine is published weekly). The app also offers you a free issue to try out, although strangely enough it’s hidden in the middle of the entire run they have for sale.

So what’s wrong? First of all, the app isn’t much more than a glorified PDF reader, albeit a slick one. Everything does look quite good, and they have nice light grey tabs on the side (pictured above) that indicate where to touch to flip pages (something I much prefer over swiping). And everything looks great and high-res, but at a cost — an entire issue is 100+ MB, and even after I had it downloaded, it would often take a second or more to load a page.

But worst of all, they’re actually charging $5 per issue, which is just unbelievable. Even Newsweek charged less for its PDF-like offering, and at least they have it so that you can read the pages without zooming in — every page here needs to be zoomed in and moved around to read, which is not a great reading experience.

The app does include a few extras, like a nifty interface to the magazine’s various blogs (above), although touching a link simply brings up the web page in-app.

I did experience a few issues beyond slow loading pages as well, including a few crashes while maneuvering through the app, a “contents” tab that just wouldn’t load any content (it did eventually, a few tries later), and a mysteriously disappearing cover page for the free issue I downloaded (above).

This is not at all what I want when it comes to iPad editions of magazines — both in terms of format and pricing — and I do hope that they will re-examine things and start offering a better reading experience (i.e. something that is formatted for iPad) in the near future.

If you’re a fan of The Guardian Eyewitness app or event the “Photo” section of the NYT app, then you’ll probably find a lot to like from the new LIFE app for iPad. Available as a free download, it’s basically an interface to LIFE magazine’s amazing photo archives.

There are a few different ways to explore the collections, starting from an “Explorer” page that lets you dig in geographically, and then a few themed sections.

It’s not perfect though, and the biggest annoyance is the ad for LIFE services (pictured above) that pops up every few photos — it’s especially annoying because when it comes it actually moves the regular interface elements away, which makes for a jarring transition. There’s also a slight load time for every single photo you view, so it seems that they should have paid a bit more attention at keeping file sizes manageable.

But hey, it’s a free app, and there’s more to like here than to not like, so well worth a download.

Remember how I was all excited the other day about the news that the iPad edition of Newsweek was now offering in-app subscriptions at very attractive prices? I mentioned I’d give an issue a try (which I bought at the regular price of $3), and it’s definitely something I regret doing.

Newsweek for iPad isn’t much more than a glorified PDF reader, so don’t expect anything more than what you get with Zinio editions of magazines, and maybe even less so. Sure, the pages are all formatted so that everything is readable without having to zoom in (which is the only interaction you are allowed), but that’s it.

I even found plenty of horrible low-res images (pictured above), and I can’t stand that any page that features full-bleed photos have a thin white frame around them.

The one thing the Newsweek app does have going for it is that it offers a section with breaking news — an NYT-esque formatting of news that appears on its website — and there’s a page full of photo galleries. But as far as the magazine itself, I expect more from an iPad edition.

It’s about time! Newsweek has just updated its iPad app to introduce subscriptions, which means that we’re finally seeing some interesting pricing on iPad magazines. Newsweek was already offering cheaper prices than the competition at $3 per issue (the Time Inc. weeklies are all $5 an issue), but with the two new available subscription options things are getting VERY cheap. Right now you can get a 12-week subscription for $10, so 80 cents an issue, or a 24-week subscription for $15, at about 60 cents an issue.

The only thing for me is that I’d much rather read Time at this price, but I’ll probably buy at least one issue of Newsweek to sample it. I do hope that subscription options start popping up more though — over to you Condé Nast and Time Inc.