PXL magazine Kickstarter project now out on the iPad
We cover many Kickstarter projects on this site, but mostly regarding accessories. There are however more than a few tablet related projects out there that have to do with software, or in this case, a digital magazine. PXL is a digital-only gaming magazine that got $3800 in funding on Kickstarter back in January and now has the first issue available through Newsstand on the iPad. At $1 per issue or $10 for a subscription it won’t break the bank, so I took a quick look at it.
Being a digital-only magazine, PXL takes a direction that many such magazines do: interactivity. Aside from having pages, you also have in-page text scrolling, content only visible in landscape mode, and so on. Some people might like this and I completely accept that I might be alone on this, but I personally prefer digital magazines to be digital magazines, not some sort of web page/flash animation-esque setup. Fully a subjective opinion though, so I won’t hold that against them.
What I will however point out as objectively disappointing was the shallow nature of a lot of the content. I only looked through it quickly, but found it lacking in many areas. As an example, the Borderlands 2 piece mentioned nothing about the game’s upcoming Tegra 3 release. Aside from it being outright incorrect to not list all the platforms it’s coming out on, it’s particularly embarrassing for a magazine that lives fully on a tablet – even if it’s the wrong OS. Then when the Mass Effect 3 “article” (actually only a paragraph, which is unfortunately somewhat of a theme in the magazine) didn’t mention a single word of the game’s tie in with iOS, my suspicions that the iPad nature of the magazine is merely a means to an end were confirmed. While PXL is technically a gaming magazine for all platforms, I just feel that having no idea of what’s going on with the device your magazine is using as its only publishing platform is a little bit…disappointing.
Still, it’s the very first issue, it doesn’t have a huge budget, it’s cheap, and it’s a Kickstarter project – so I won’t discount its place in the world just yet. With the iPad 3 being out today and bumping the resolution to a point where you never have to zoom to read text formatted for paper again, magazines should be more popular than ever on iOS. It’s just a shame that the Newsstand service isn’t cross platform, which is why I find myself still using Zinio despite my issues with their customer service and privacy policy.
[Kickstarter | iTunes]
