Safari To Go App Reviews

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.

Good idea. Good app. But there is an issue in the landscape mode : sometimes long sentences are not correctly displayed. (it is boring). Furthermore, it is really reducing my battery life. I hope a new release soon.

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.

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.

The first version was almost unusable, full of bugs and missing usability features (I really wonder how they got past the Apple validation process with it). This version (2.0) seems a bit better, at least it is more or less responsive most of the time (though not always), hasnt crashed so far and uses common UI elements. It still contains errors tough (disappearing pages for example), is responding slowly sometimes and lacks some features, but at least it seems a bit more usable now and the offline bag feature is really a plus compared to the web site (though it still seems to have problems). I hope they can further improve it in future versions, there is still a lot to do. Update: The offline reading feature would be very handy, but unfortunately it still has some major problems that prevents me from using it properly. Sometimes pages just disappear, sometimes The home screen is shown for no apparent reason and showing the last visited page does not work in some cases. Also: I could swear I put two books in my offline bag, but it only shows me one when Im actually offline. There are too many problems left like the ones mentioned, I get the impression that a QA team is missing here and the users are used instead for that purpose.

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!

Hey Boys and Girls behind Safari Books online! The Service is Perfect, but the App to use the Service on an mobile device is Bad. I cant follow links inside of the Books which i read, that an Basic Feature which has to work!

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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.

Since update to version 3.3.5 app doesnt work anymore. When trying to read a book it hangs with spinning wheel. Please fix it!

Since update to version 3.3.5, app fails on iOS 5.

First I have to say I love Safari Books and have been waiting eagerly for this application. Ive only used this app for about an hour but already I see many glaring issues with it. Firstly there is no easy way for you to know whether a book in your Bookbag has been downloaded or not. The app gives you instructions to tap on the book in your book bag but it is not obvious looking at that screen whether the book has been downloaded. There is some text that says "Processing offline book", but for whatever reason that text is in the button for marking a book as favourite. This makes no sense at all from a UI perspective. Please take a look at the WSJ app to see a better way for showing users what is downloaded and what is downloading. Another huge issue with this app is performance. This app has to be one of the worst Ive ever used in terms of responsiveness. I find myself repeatedly dragging my finger across the screen just to scroll through a document. Sometimes there is a delay and the page doesnt scroll until after Ive stopped dragging. Sometimes the screen jitters back and forth rapidly while dragging. The app also doesnt use swipe gestures for navigating between pages. Almost every book reader on the iPad supports swipe gestures for moving between pages and I cant understand why this app doesnt either. In order to make a book available offline you need to either favourite it and then choose to add it to the Bookbag category or go to your favourites and drag it from one category to the Bookbag category. The problem though is that in latter use case, if you drag a book from your collection of favourite (Java) books to the Bookbag it no longer belongs to your collection of favourite Java books. Its now your favourite Bookbag book. This is terrible. By placing the Bookbag in the dialog for managing favourites you have mixed the concepts of a favourite group and books that you can read offline. Please find a better way to manage the Bookbag. The potential for this app is HUGE and Im glad they finally released it. To the developers: Im not sure what the problem is but it feels like the app is using non-standard controls all over the place. It makes no sense that scrolling is an issue. I feel like you guys have gone out of your way to give the app a particular look and feel at the expense of the responsiveness and consistency of a typical iPad app. Please improve the responsiveness of this app. I look forward to future improvements.

I think as an initial release, this isnt too bad. When I use Safari Online with Safari the Browser on my iPad, there are some major annoyances with page centering and missing scroll bars which makes using the Safari Online interface practically impossible with the iPad. I literally cant get to my books without having to enter the search bar and type in their titles and practically browse through a bunch of similarly named books before I get the one that I want. At least with the app, I can get to all of my books from My Favorites list and read through them with relative ease. The one major annoyance with the app though is when browsing my favorites list (and some other lists for that matter) it displays a popup window of the list that allows you to view the book covers. In some instances the book titles are difficult to read from the covers, so then I can change to a list view. However, that view really needs a separate scroll bar so I can peruse through long lists. As it is right now, when I drag across the list, sometimes it locks on to a book in the list and attempts to drag the one book around as opposed to scrolling through the list. I still havent figured out the technique for differentiating between grabbing a book and scrolling through the list so it takes several frustrating attempts before it does what I want. - TMB

This is a great start, minor scrolling glitches but otherwise its great and love the off-line reading!

Slow an unresponsive at times. Sometimes when I tap the arrow to turn pages it works, sometimes its slow and sometimes it just doesnt work. Add in the lack of gestures and Im starting to wonder why it took so long for them to develop this app. For a big media company Safari should be embarassed about this piece of trash.

Nice interface. Thank you for making this app available.