Browsing through A whole Lotta Nothing today I noticed a link to the Business 2.0 - October Issue, and although I have already read the magazine (some very good articles in this issue) I saw it said they presented it online in a "slick" way, that wasn't a PDF.


So of course my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check it out.

I was expecting to get to the site and see the magazine presented as FlashPaper. Oddly I found that it is only a FlashPaper rip-off. At first I thought to myself, why go through the trouble of recreating a UI when FlashPaper already has one (and it looks better). It wasn't until I started going through it that I noticed it had some nice improvements. The zoom feature, current page, and forward and back buttons are all the same. But this UI has a really nice way of showing (via a tree menu) all the pages / sections and allowing you to get right to the story you want without having to "flip" through the entire magazine. This is something that really speeds things up and makes the overall experience better (FlashPaper take note). Another added feature was the Utility buttons up at the top. Here you are able to print, find, send, or get help. Unfortunately clicking on each of these takes you too a new page away from the magazine. Using Flash could avoid this and allow the user to "hold" the same experience throughout everything. The only other minus was the fact that it used Frames. I know, I know they "can" have their uses, but again this is something that if moved over into a Flash UI could be done without.

So while I think the general idea reminds me of FlashPaper the feature has some definite plusses. Personally creating a combination of the two with the "rich" features you get in Flash would be one heck of an app to browser online books or magazines.