Magtastic Blogsplosion

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.