NXTBook Media written 5 years ago
For the past 12 months or so www.prospects.ac.uk have been emailing me with their graduate magazine. Fair enough, no crime in that, I am after all soon to be needing a job.
But what I have found totally bemusing is their use of NXTBook to display their latest issue to me. Touted as being a “Fully interactive” “Digital Magazine” I was at first excited to look at something new and novel, but instead I was presented with something horrible and unusable.
Sixty million progress bars initially shuffled across the page, and still each page needed to have it’s own (slow) loading bar. The pages were presented, for some reason, in a 2-up A4 layout. This gives me a fantastic screen full of illegible text. Why not present something that’s actually useful as the default view?
Each page takes an age to load — much because of the nice high resolution images each page uses. If you don’t want to wait for each page to download individually, you could always download the entire magazine (as an executable file). I downloaded this weeks issue of Prospects Graduate, and it came to 15MB. What are they thinking?
Have a look at some of the samples.
The NXTBook is meant to ease the transition of printed media to the web, but they fail to acknowledge that the web has it’s own rules about content presentation.
They would have been better sending out pdfs to people.
Comments 3 comments made
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saysThe “page” turning technique peed me off, half the time it didn’t work, and the multi-coloured loading bars gave me a headache, Nina gives this 4 out of 10 (mostly for effort)
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saysOh there’s no questioning that there’s a heck of a lot of effort gone into this .. the big questions is why bother?
I’m honestly curious, it must do something for them to keep it up for so long. Or maybe it’s not doing so well, since they have a competition to win, yes you guessed it, an ipod.
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saysARGH @ iPod competitions, I am genuinely fed up of them. To some people, this prospectus doo-dah looks very impressive, the book-like layout and the colours, the ability to turn a page as if you would in real life! (woooooooo) whereas I would rather have the real book, no loading bars and awkward mouse movements. But Rob…. it’s spangly!!!! Sorta….