Nat Geo

I have always loved National Geographic. My parents used to subscribe to it, and later on my mom bought me a subscription for my birthday every year for a long time. I think there's no better way to appreciate the big and diverse world we live in than to read about other places and other cultures.

Now Nat Geo has started up subscriptions on the iPad and at $19.99 a year, it's a great deal. So I signed up and just read my first issue. It's as good as ever, and it includes 100% of the magazine content, plus a whole bunch of new interactive stuff.

It's amazing to see Nat Geo's fantastic photographs look even better than they do in the magazine. And the layout seems naturally made for the iPad. You can scroll across articles horizontally, and each article is in a vertical stack. So you go to the right to read the next article, and then read it downwards. When you get to the bottom you just swipe right and there's the next article. It's a very well thought-out navigation strategy. I know Nat Geo didn't invent it because all iPad subscriptions use some form of it, but it makes reading magazines easy and fun. And the interactive content is first-rate. For instance, one article was about the sinking of man-made objects to create artificial reefs. On one page was a photo of a ship sinking, just like in the print edition. But you could also activate a movie that actually showed the ship sinking in real time. Another photo of a sunken German U-boat could be "pinch-zoomed" revealing every little detail. Very cool stuff.

I also did a trial of The New Yorker Magazine, which I also really like, but quickly found out that I don't have nearly the time in my day to read an entire magazine every week, especially one as packed full of content as that one is. So I had to make the decision to stick with my one favorite magazine for now, Nat Geo.