Cinefex for the iPad, the wait is over.
Ever since I saw the first magazine apps for the iPad I dreamed of having a Cinefex magazine app for it. I thought it made so much sense. Since the beginning Cinefex has been THE vfx related magazine. It always has great insight on the years biggest VFX productions with in depth interviews with some of the greatest VFX supervisors and crews of the industry.
The thing is while the information in this magazine is priceless and insightful you still want to see the finished result and those breakdowns that we all love. So the iPad really would give that possibility of beautiful images and breakdowns that the user can experience in a great device.
So in the last issue of Cinefex I saw that they were preparing the iPad app and I was really excited about it. And just yesterday I saw a post that ILM posted on their facebook page saying it was finally out. Of course, I had to see for my self and got home and downloaded it.
Now I’ll do a little review about the app :D
When you open the app this is what you get. All the covers of this amazing magazine sorted by year. There is the available column and the my issues column that represent the issues you’ve downloaded.
Once you click on one of your issues (after buying and downloading it) you acces the contents. The first page is the cover of the magazine and if you tap on it you get the menu bar that we now explain.
- The first icon will return you back to the Cinefex home screen
- The arrow icons will help you cycle from one page or the other but you can also do so by swiping across.
- The watch icon is the history that saves the pages you’ve just visited. I guess it can be used like a bookmark-ish kind-of feature.
- The next icon is the one you see on the previous capture. It is an index of the articles so you can directly go to an article of your choice
- The last icon of this bunch is to see an expanded view of the magazine contents. Let’s see the next capture to get a good grasp of what this means
As we can see in this view, this allows us to see all the contents of the magazine. At this point the magazine is structured in a very simple way. There are the:
- Ads: which are a single page and some of them with interactive content such as promotional videos or showreels in the cases of studio ads
- The articles: which are basically a cover page, the text article itself, and the images and breakdowns that are mostly mentioned in the article text. The Text bit is the long piece you see in the image above. You basically read through it by scrolling up and down until you finish it and move on to the images and breakdowns.
- Another feature of the magazine is the search feature that allows you to search for contents within that issue of the magazine.
This view is a combined view (not what you actually see on the magazine) of the images and breakdowns part of the article. There are some images that you can cycle through the various stages of production of the effect, and in some cases even see some lovely video breakdowns that are always welcomed.
And that is about it! So in my opinion this totally what I was looking for! The issues are cheaper than the normal tri-monthly magazine that normally runs about $12.50. The electronic issues are $5 dollars or you can do a yearly subscription to get all of them for $19.
Lastly you can see the video that Cinefex has put together explaining the App. Oh and by the way Issue 127 is FREE so just for that it is worth downloading the app and the issue and seing the amazing effects created for Captain America, Cowboys and Aliens, Anonymus and Harry Potter 7.2! So enjoy thanks to the Cinefex team!
