You foodies out there will be happy to know that Gourmet Live has just has just hit the Apple iPad. Try not to drool on your screen.
The Gourmet Live app for the Apple iPad is free and I’ve yet to see advertising in it. You can find articles and recipes for some scrumptious dishes and there’s even inline videos.
There’s an odd rewards system which will unlock new content if you sign up with your Twitter or Facebook Connect profile. My version seemed a little buggy though, as I wasn’t able to sign in with my Facebook account.
The Gourmet Live app for the Apple iPad does look beautiful. There are many mouth-watering photos, quality articles and useful recipes. If this is your sort of thing, I would recommend downloading it but there are a few niggles.
No matter what I tried, I could get the Gourmet Live Apple iPad app to rotate in to landscape mode. I guess locking users in to a defined view is a new trend, as Sports Illustrated recently went landscape-only for its tablet app.
The navigation on the Gourmet Live app for the Apple iPad is also kind of jumbled. I also don’t like having to sign up for another account, especially after I’ve linked in my Twitter account.
This app is neat by itself but it points to a larger trend of magazine publishers targeting the Apple iPad and other tablets for the future. You can’t just replicate your paper magazine on the tablet and hope it is a success and we’ve seen some interesting stuff so far.
The Wired app uses interesting interactive graphics and in-line videos and People is offering its app for free to normal subscribers. I think both of these are interesting uses of the tablet space.
Apple is supposedly working on a subscription plan for its iPad, so look for a lot more magazines soon.