iPhone 5 Portable Genius

Reading Magazines with Newsstand

Magazine publishers have been coming up with all kinds of innovative new tools and techniques that make reading a digital version of a magazine a more interactive and media-rich experience than reading the print version.

If there’s a problem with iPhone-based magazines, it’s that you have to manage a different app for each magazine, which gets clumsy once you have more than a half dozen or so magazine apps scattered around your Home screens. You can try plopping all your magazine apps into a single folder, but then it makes it hard to see the icon badges that tell you a new issue is available.

To solve these kinds of problems, your iPhone offers Newsstand, an app specifically designed to manage magazines. Newsstand is really a special folder, and when you tap it, you see a replica of a magazine shelf (see Figure 12.9). For magazine apps that know how to work with Newsstand (in the App Store, open the Newsstand category), when you install such an app, it loads the most recent issue in the Newsstand, which lets you browse your available issues in a single spot. As I write this, a number of magazine publishers have signed on to support Newsstand, including Condé Nast (Wired, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and many more), National Geographic, Hearst, Bloomberg, and Disney. Newsstand also supports newspaper subscriptions, so expect to see the likes of the New York Times and other major newspapers.

12.9 Use the Newsstand app to organize your iPhone ...