After a big PR push and a long delay, PMc, the first magazine designed only for the iPhone, is now available for 99c in the iTunes store. Rather than a brand extension of an existing title, instead it’s a brand-new fashion and style magazine from photographer Patrick McMullan. A brave new world or a missed opportunity?

Publisher Michael Prenez-Isbell’s introduction promises a new issue every two weeks, in an exciting new format, “the first browser ever built that incorporates advertising into the browser model from the start.” Its creator, the Hot Phone Hit Factory, calls it ‘Grail’.

“There’s no scrolling because we think that interferes with reading the magazine. Books and magazines don’t scroll… Starting soon we’ll have new interactive content, new kinds of ads and we’ll be mixing daily and static content – every week day (sic), two sections will be refreshed: PMc Social… and PMc Daily, our fresh feed of beauty, health, fashion and events.”

Once you’ve bought the thing, PMc magazine is a reasonably hefty 20.1mb download, and is represented by a fairly uninspiring icon for your iPhone home screen. Tapping it brings forth a red curtain, on which is emblazoned “Hot Phone Hits Entertainment Presents…”

So far, so unsubtle.

And then the cover, which sets the design level at “mediocre free magazine”, a depth it never really emerges from.

The opening Table of Contents is typical of its navigation problems, both in design and programming. The “How this magazine works” introduction is the fifth item on an eight-item menu – I missed it the first few times I visited the page. Surely that should be first?

Secondly, each title is a link – but tapping a link doesn’t highlight it, as it does in the iPhone browser, so you’re not sure you’ve done it right in the pause while it loads. The contents page design is very ‘blah’, as was the cover. As a navigation page, it’s uninspiring at best, counter productive at worst.

One font is used throughout – Arial / Arial Black, at a pretty small size (8pt?) – and, most frustratingly, the first iPhone magazine doesn’t utilise what makes iPhone navigation special: you can’t zoom in on text or photos; you can’t flip the phone sideways for different navigation. It gives a nod to the “dots” style of navigation from the iPhone’s home screen, to show pages gone / to come – and then mostly forgets to implement them in the correct way. It feels like they’re taking away what makes your iPhone special, and that frustration never really goes away.

Another problem is the lack of a gallery of mini-spreads to select an exact page, as e-magazines now often have. This is particularly irritating when you double-tap an ad to get to the advertiser’s webpage: you have no way of returning to where you left off. Instead you have to reload the app and cycle through the contents page and then the entire section to get back to the article you were reading.

The articles are uninspiring, don’t match the “fashion-insider-y” image they’re trying to portray, and are often difficult to read, particularly on some of the coloured backgrounds. Sure, you can’t scroll books or magazines – but you can scroll the browser on the iPhone, and that’s what this audience is accustomed to using. Overall, images that accompany articles are underused and their context is not well thought out.

There are also programming issues – previous and future pages flash up occasionally as you scroll through, and the whole thing crashed ten seconds into my first load.

Grail may be revolutionary for the advertiser, but it doesn’t do the reader any favours: some ads are tricky to read or don’t look good because they’re displayed at the wrong resolution – including even Patrick McMullan’s own ad (possibly because these are adapted web ads at 72dpi, whereas the iPhone screen is 160dpi). Ad placement is random and intrusive. Grail’s special AdPile dock – “just like a print magazine, PMc lets you tear the ads out!” – isn’t very user-friendly; and why can’t you tear out articles and photos, “just like a print magazine”? Why only the ads? And then why put them into a special AdPile dock? Why not have them appear in the phone’s own photo gallery, with a copyright banner on them, as many other third-party iPhone apps allow?

However, there is one area where they might be on to something: the section called ‘PMc Social’. Patrick McMullan’s photographs from celeb parties and launches are the best designed/best looking thing in the whole magazine. They’re simple, uncomplicated, look good, and do what they’re supposed to, in a portable format that works well, and they have a clear reason to exist.

If this magazine were to become solely an iPhone celeb / society magazine, with updates available the day after big events, ads placed between events… well, it’s not my kind of thing, but it makes sense, there’s an audience for that kind of thing, and it makes good use of the technology, unlike everything else in the first issue of PMc.

Overall, it feels rushed, badly thought out, and not only fails to take advantage of what the iPhone can do, but also fails even to use the technology in the most basic ways that are built in. The social section aside, I’d even suggest that it does more harm than good to the professionalism of Patrick McMullan’s brand among designers and the tech-savvy.

Like Esquire‘s flashing e-paper, they were indeed there first* – but they should have been there better. Others – and Hot Phone Hit Factory promises a forthcoming travel magazine in the same format called Looking Glass, though my hopes for it aren’t high – will show how the iPhone can truly become an innovative publishing platform. Right now, the iPhone’s newsstand has only one title on it – and it isn’t worth the 99c they’re charging.

* Yes, I know Texterity has a claim, but it’s browser-based – this is the first iPhone-only mag.

Grazia moves into perspex pod
Shoppers gape at fishbowl antics of wacky magazine staff, without the option to vote them out if they’re boring

Special fake-old Rolling Stone wraparound for Life on Mars USA
America’s equivalent of Camberwick Green is ironically much better than RS‘s own recent covers

Gunpowder online magazine “officially launches 5th November”
What other date could they choose? (Though it’s actually based in Marbella, Spain.) Yet again raises the question of “what is a magazine” vs “what is a webpage”. See the intros to We Love Magazines and The Last Magazine for more on why this doesn’t fit either my or David Renard’s definitions (and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with paper)

Magazine butchers submissions on 19th-century operating table
Get thee hither in London on October 30th

The golden age of magazine photography?
An incomplete list of classic titles, to buy now or search eBay for later, if you have the time / patience

Music mag relaunches as no-ad bookazine
Won’t be the last. I wonder if Radar will reappear as an annual next year? (Bonus link: flyer for Radar‘s Print is Dead Halloween goodbye party)

Mygazines closes
Shortly after agreeing a settlement that removed all their popular content. Not so much a victory as a warning of skirmishes to come

Cosmo to carry section for men
Let no advertiser remain untouched

GQ UK celebrates 20 years by taking over Savile Row
“Tailor Mark Marengo will project images from GQ’s archive onto a white suit in its window, while Richard James and Ozwald Boateng will put large-scale displays in their stores.” Fun real-world interaction – more please, and not just in capital cities / NYC

Eco magazine decides not to use paper
Makes sense. But are they offsetting the energy used to host it?

AXM gets caught out posting fake comments
Nobody messes with Private Frazer

A long-standing favourite of mine, Good magazine has been branching out, and in some interesting ways.

Their new CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, formerly of Ethos water, has been using his Starbucks connections in creating The Good Sheet, a rather lovely piece of weekly infographic specialness themed on election issues, and exclusively distributed every Thursday in Starbucks across the USA.

It’s essentially a fold-out, newsprint version of the magazine’s Upfront section, where different studios (KarlssonWilker, Practise London and more) are given a topic and some stats, to grapple with. In this case, they have to make pretty on a 58cmx30cm sheet (while advertising on the second fold helps pay for the thing).

Themes so far have been Climate Change, Health Care, Immigration, Gas Prices and Education with The Economy to follow tomorrow, and two more TBA in the following two weeks before the election.

Typically for Good, the carbon emissions in making the thing have been offset, it’s all printed on mostly postconsumer waste paper, and it’s been released on an Attribution / Not-for-profit / No derivatives Creative Commons license.

Some are more lovely than others – the immigration maze is a little confusing (and should have been printed on the left side, not the right), for instance. But Education and Health Care are rather, erm, good. You can see them all, and print them off if you have enough paper, on their website.

Good is starting to branch out in other areas too. The latest issue of the magazine has a (mostly not very successful, but hey) Business ‘edition’ on the flip side of their list-filled (not their best issue, but hey) Election special, and the recent relaunch of the website is filled with community-based webness.

They’ve stated an aim to use the magazine to reach out further, into events and other publications. They’ve also instituted a Radiohead subscription model – though as their subscription fees go to charity, you’d be a hard hearted soul to sell them short.

In other words, print, experimentation, innovation and designery goodness, all while being very aware of what they do and why – which is to make the world a better place. Good for them.