Safari To Go app good for
This is an awesome service and gives valuable functionality to my iPad mini. Nevertheless, a built-in dictionary that would be activated when you touch a word would be really helpful.
While the first version was slow and inferior to even the website, this one gets it right most of the time. The page handling is not as smooth as in other ebook apps, but the UI is functional and responsive. I think I may finally start reading the books on my shelf.
I like the app and I use it but I have some problems:
I often get "Network errors" even though I should have a great connection and no other apps have problems.
Also I think the syncing could be improved. Its not often a problem but sometimes I read on my desktop for reference but on my iPad I would like to continue reading on the page I am on. The iPad app should not automatically switch to the new page but offer me the option to stay on the current page or switch to the page received from another device.
This is a great start, minor scrolling glitches but otherwise its great and love the off-line reading!
The interface is cleaner, its somewhat faster, if not as fast as the web app. The interface is much better.
The first release of the complete rewrite is as Id wished for. The native app is responsive, looks great, and seems to work well.
Im sure people will point out all the things that dont work, but heres what does:
- You can read books with ease. Looks like page turning is cached if youre actually reading, flipping pages faster has a slight delay but seems about the same as over the web.
- You can read offline. Yes, currently only one book; I believe theyve done this first to see how well it works before scaling it up later on.
Compared to browsing in Safari on the iPad, this is definitely superior; and now its compelling enough that "Look I have 14,000 books on my iPad" will win new customers.
FYI - Yes, you need to subscribe to use this, but Safari Books Online even without this is totally worth it if youre serious about reading (mostly technical) books.
Some bad moments
Frankly, this application comes as a huge disappointment from the Safari team:
I have been thinking of resigning my subscription from Safari Online for months since I hardly ever use it. I have the entry-level subscription plan which gives me web access to books (with only a few tokens to download PDFs) and I never managed to read through the hundreds of pages of documentation online.... Instead I had been waiting for a decent iPad application which would let me read on my portable device and code on my computer.
So, when I *finally* learned Safari had got an application out (whats it been, one year since the iPads there?), I decided to give it one more try.
The result : "almost but not there". And now Im thinking about canceling my whole subscription, unless Safari quickly addresses the following issues:
* Its slow as hell, even on an iPad with an A4 chip.
Thats just not acceptable when you can get apps like Kindle or iBooks which display text much better
* Its buggy
The application crashed on me a couple of times, failed to load book pictures at startup (which, btw, is useless : Im interested in MY books, not viewing yet another random unrelated books).
* The user interface doesnt feel natural
For some reason the application designers chose not to follow the usual iOS best practices : There is no feedback when you touch a button (and, since its so slow, you often dont know what happened), its not possible to go from one page to another by swiping (instead you have to click on little arrows at the bottom), there is no landscape view but instead a portrait-only display that often makes the text tiny unless you zoom, etc.... Frankly, this looks like an embedded HTML application and not something designed for the user in mind.
* Offline mode hardly works
After days of trying, Ive only managed to synchronize one book to my offline book bag, the interface was so unnatural! And when that finally worked, I got random errors trying add other ones...
The idea behind this application is great, but it just doesnt work on my device.
Problem is not specific to the app, the website also does not work. Seems to be a problem with account authentication...
As a paying customer, Im getting tired by the bugs and poor service
I cant believe this app doesnt permit text highlight. Making it useless for me because i NEED to highlight text when learning from a technical book, which this app is about. This is so frustrating because the concept is great.
The first few days the app worked well enough. It was slow, too slow, but I was more than happy to accept that for offline reading. At some point it simply stopped working. When Im not connected to a wifi network, it tells me to connect to one in order to use the app. The whole point of the app for me is to be able to read Safari books when I dont have a wifi network in reach. I cant say whether this bug is restricted to my device or more wide spread, but given the bugs from the first version and now I can recommend this app only for beta testing and not for widespread use.
This evidence of weak coding and designing capabilitirs is completely useless. The userinterface is more worse than the experience within the mobile browser (if it works without errors), the reading experience is bad and the worst of all: If you are on the road, you cannot use this app at all, because WIFI is required - and this really makes this app to crap.
Dont waste memory for this, use your browser and youll be much more happy.
Heres a wild idea: give the guys who write your apps a subscription to SBO!
Your actual product (access to a significant part of current technical literature for a monthly fee) is fantastic and world-changing - yet your apps are surprisingly buggy (random crashes, slow, amateurish text-layout, have to reinstall frequently, ...). Fix that guys, SBO is worth it!