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.

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.

:)

Amazing that such an incredible magazine about science and technology is delivered through one of the worst apps out there. Terrible UI, with lame features and, worst of all, a tendency to lock up on issues and then never release them. You can't even delete them when they get like this, short of uninstalling the entire app. Which would be fine, except you then would lose the scrapbook of saved articles. And seems like the problem gets worse with time. I have half a dozen issues from the last 6 months I can neither read nor delete.

Which is the second worst thing. Great you can save individual articles. But no way to sync these across devices or somehow save them in the cloud for later syncing if you buy a new device.

Too bad really. Because the content is, as New Scientist has always been, fantastic.