therefore the toolbar is cluttered with mostly useless things like "annotations", options, "give a friend a free copy" (yeah right, I want to keep my friends).you can't tell the difference between the application being focussed or not, so you can't tell looking at it whether keypresses will work.it doesn't have a title bar to tell you what the actual application is.There is no "don't warn about this in future" option. Even worse, it pops up this dialog to tell me I don't have Flash, EVERY SINGLE TIME the page is displayed for any reason, even just resizing the window. Amusingly, even though I just updated Flash to try and get the online reader working, the Zinio reader still claims I don't have it installed.There is no "continuous" page view as even Adobe's PDF reader has - so you can't see the bottom of one page while moving to the next.The buttons that look like back and forward are just previous and next page. Accidentally click the contents button? There's no way to get back to where you were before. There is no back and forward like a browser.Infuriatingly, pressing the cursor down key when already at the bottom of a page, scrolls to the top of the same page, and pressing page down goes to the next page, so there is no way to adjust your position while reading to be sure you're at the bottom of the page.You can actually have a structure for the document that is navigable. There doesn't seem to be any way to have a table of contents permanently visible - the contents button just goes back to the front page of contents.So if you click and don't move enough, instead of moving slightly you've suddenly zoomed out to unreadably small.
Clicking the mouse on the page zooms in and out (page width to full page maybe?), but you also click to move the page around.I'm not sure what kind of idiotic coders they have who would not know about multimonitor support - this is the MEDIA industry, guys. Unfortunate, because that monitor is perfect for such reading tasks. It won't let me move it to my second monitor.Within 30 seconds of trying it I was too annoyed to continue.
They have an offline reader which sucks in almost all ways. It still manages to be really slow to load, before displaying a blank grey page.
They have an "online" (Flash) reader which doesn't function at all on my PC (Firefox 3, Flash 10). About the only features of electronic use they actually provide are electronic distribution (to selected platforms) and links. Basically, this allows all the hidebound paper layout guys at the magazines to go on pretending they are publishing to a piece of paper, thus neatly negating almost all the benefits of online reading, but allowing them to continue their A4-limited habits.
Instead it's like a PDF on steroids - fixed layout, fixed fonts, fixed colors, and an unhealthy dose of DRM.
Zinio is a way for magazines to publish an "online" version without any of that tedious mucking around with making it into actual HTML. Unfortunately, the electronic subscription is via Zinio. Great, I thought, recently they seem to be offering good articles. You will need the number below the barcode on your campus ID in order to create an account if you are using an off-campus computer.I saw recently that PC Magazine has an electronic subscription. Make sure you use the same email address for your account as you did for your library collection account. When a magazine is checked out through the library collection account the link to the account automatically opens.You can also download the checked out magazines on a mobile device for offline reading.Check out the magazines you want (with the library collection account) in your computer/tablet browser and stream the magazine instantly (with your personal reading account) on your computer.A separate account, called a personal reading account, is needed to access and read magazines.You will need to create a library collection account to use these services once you create one, it will work for both. Zinio and IndieFlix are both accessed from the RB Digital Gateway page.