New Scientist 12+

The updated app is an all round massive improvement over the previous app. I have been reading NS back to back since I was a teenager, and after moving abroad I elected to skip the printed version in favour of the digital. This way it's always in my pocket and I evade the massive stack of finished editions. As happy I am with all the small improvements, one change from the old app, a reduction in usability is to me hard to forgive.

The app does not support landscape on mobile phones.

It does support landscape viewing on my iPad, so I can only assume it was a concious decision to restrict the switch to landscape on smaller devices. This seems to ignore the massive amount of phonecases that specifically make it easy to lay your phone down for reading hands free. I am now forced to prop my phone against objects just to be able to sip my coffee as I read. Thank god for my old iPad, but that doesn't travel with me and thus this oversight or uncomprehesable design decision takes away the only real advantage I saw to subscribing digitally. I guess I will be switching back to the printed subscribtion.

New Scientist is like talking to the smartest and most profound thinkers on my plane of existence. It’s all about profound thoughts and ideas that you can’t find talking to the people around you. It’s things that excite me and make me ask more questions! But try to explain this kind of excitement to anyone in you’re sphere of people and they smile and nod and get glazed looks in their eyes…

It’s refreshing for curious people and it’s mind bending! It’s just what I need when everything is hard and complicated in life and I need a more complex tangible reason why it is that way….Its my religion…

My most profound and powerful thought has always been that “In this life, in this plane and in this body…I will never know enough to explain the real BIG QUESTION!” But as much as I can, I’ve come through with a breakthrough that is profound, amazing, thought provoking and enough to settle my existential question. I was right all along!!! Hot Dog! I can die happy now!

I absolutely love and adore NewScientist, and appreciate the strides the app has made, especially over the last couple of years, where I found I no longer truly cared about having a physical magazine delivered, and no longer preferred using NewScientist in a web browser, two things I am very happy about, actually.

One feature I would enjoy seeing, is a way to easily click to the text articles directly from the audio player & queue. I am an absolutely horrible listener, and have to do things like focus only on a person's lips while they're speaking, or I'll accidentally begin to tune them out. When I listen to NewScientist articles, I like to have the written article up so that I can pause the article and read the part that I have just noticed I've been unintentionally ignoring, ha...

I think even normally functioning humans would enjoy being able to click directly to the written article from the audio player.

:)