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Interweave offered me review copies of two of its new iPad apps, and since I’m always hearing crafters on Twitter asking where the good apps are, I was excited to check them out.
Interweave has quite a range of apps now. (Unfortunately, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a single web page that shows you all of them.) You can get a preview of each title for free, and then within the app, you can purchase individual “eMag” issues. I wanted to try two titles with differing aims: Live Wire, which is an instructional app for making wire jewelry, and Colorways, which is an informational title about natural dyes and textiles.
The downloads each took a couple minutes on my iPad. (You can go in and view your app while it’s in mid-download, but that means you’ll have lots of pauses in the reading experience while individual pages finish downloading. So it’s better to make yourself some tea while the download completes.)
The issue price of $4.99 is great as compared to the prices of many print magazines these days. Both apps, however, contain some sponsorship presence – Live Wire has a one-page ad from an outside sponsor, plus another one-page ad for Interweave wire titles. Colorways contains a few ad pages as well, and all for various Interweave publications for the spinning and dyeing crowd. I didn’t find any of this very problematic – given the quality of the production here, I’d think some sponsor dollars/house advertising would be helpful for keeping the cover price down.
So, let’s take these one at a time…
Live Wire is an excellent entry point for what I’d call advanced beginners with wire. Much of the instructional content is aimed at the basics (opening a jump ring, making wrapped loops), but the project set also involves some hammering and patina.
The projects themselves are pretty and interesting, and each one provides a nice entry point into a specific wire technique. Each project is covered in complete step-by-step fashion.
There are also show-and-tell sections covering the tools and materials you’d need and the basics of handling wire.
I love embedded video in ebooks – it’s so great to see a key technique in motion, with helpful tips from an expert. Denise Peck’s videos on making link loops were worth the five bucks to me all by themselves. And I loved that even the hammering and patina projects had their own basics videos.
Live Wire also takes advantage of the on-screen format to really maximize the size of the step-by-step photos for each project. The photography throughout is wonderful – Clear, sharp-focused, and perfectly framed to communicate the kinds of tiny details wirework is all about.
The Resources page, of course, links you directly to company websites – another thing apps can do better than print.
Speaking of print, each project has an accompanying PDF, which you can open in iBooks and, assuming you have a wireless printer connection for your iPad, print them. Personally, I felt this was a slightly weak point in the app. The PDF’s, constrained as they are by an 8 ½” x 11″ page format, contain much smaller photos. I’d use the easier-to-read layouts from within the app, but I can see where having a means of printing individual projects without consuming too much fo your toner could be useful for some users.
Colorways was, for me, an interesting glimpse into a craft I know next to nothing about. This app seems to be aimed at people who already have a good working knowledge of dyeing textiles; there’s a fair amount of jargon that doesn’t have explanation.
This app is much more about storytelling than how-to’s, however. As a newbie, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about cochineal (a red dye made from dried Peruvian bugs), the various natural colors of cotton fiber, a Japanese sun-dyeing technique called Kakishibu, and the Hèrè jè Center in Mali, which is a micro-enterprise teaching women and girls to dye beautiful cloth as a means of income and independence.
There is a also little how-to in here: Chris Conrad has a fascinating demonstration of Kakishibu, and India Flint demonstrates a technique called “cold-bundled eco-printing,” in which fabric is rolled with natural ingredients and then left to imprint slowly over time.
As in LiveWire, the still photography is excellent. I did feel that the videos in Colorways left a bit to be desired. I loved, for example, watching the Kokishibu demonstration and seeing a woman in Guatemala spinning cotton yarn. But there are quite a few “talking head” videos, in which the author or subject of an article stand and talk about the subject matter, and for me, these quickly grow stale, as they’re missing interesting visuals.
All in all, though, I think these apps are beautifully-presented and each one does what it does well. I like that Interweave is reaching artists and crafters at a variety of levels, and hope to see even more issues aimed at beginners and more advanced makers. The nice thing about these apps is their relative permanence as learning resources, which is a weird thing to say about a digital product, but bear with me. Print magazines, as we all know, tend to become clutter over time. We shelve them, or box them up, or trip over them in the hallway, but no matter how we archive them, locating a specific article at a specific time may require some time and effort.
Digital apps like these take up no space, other than disk space on my iPad. So I can easily refer to them again and again and easily get at specific pieces of information when I need them. Well done, Interweave!
According to a conversation I had with one of their CS reps a couple of weeks ago, their e-books and e-magazines are only for Ipads and PC’s. They do not yet have Android-ready versions available but say they’re working on it. Eventually they (or someone) will have something like an “Interweave Reader” app just as they exist now for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, or else Interweave will create digital content in a different format.
However!…all digital downloads from Interweave that arrive in pdf format can easily and wonderfully be opened and read on an Android tablet right now (such as Toshiba Thrive, Motorola Xoom, etc.) I installed the Adobe reader for free on my Thrive and thoroughly enjoy reading issues of their magazines (pdf files). In fact, the color and image xoom’ing features make it better than a hard copy.
I should add that I also tried reading these pdf magazine files on a Barnes and Noble Nook. It worked, but because the magazines I was viewing (CLoth,Paper,Scissors) was so image-dense, it was really slow going from one page to the next. I found that annoying. The speed of the tablet is much better for this purpose.
Interweave e-books or e-magazines that are not in pdf files cannot yet be opened on the Android-based tablets. If in doubt, check with their customer service before ordering.
I have also purchased and downloaded several Interweave videos and had not as great results. Interweave recommends using either Quicktime 7 or Videolan’s VLC (both free) software to view their digital videos. These work well on my PC, but neither is available for the Android. The video player that came pre-installed on my Thrive also will not open the files. I am using a free app called MXplayer (if I’m remembering correctly) and it sort of works but the voice and video do not sync and sometimes it will stall, I suspect because of that.
I have not searched into forums to see what other video-playing software might work better and if someone knows of one, I’d love to hear about it!
Hope this helps add to the conversation. Thanks for venturing into this topic, Diane!
Awesomeness, Debbie – thanks for all that helpful detail!
Debbie (and/or Diane), do you know if purchasing the e-books on one platform will transfer over to another? After this review I’m ready to go and buy Colorways right this second for my laptop, but I do plan on buying a tablet sometime in the next year which gives me a bit of hesitancy about vacuuming up all the Interweave emags I’m interested in right this second.
I’ve asked Jaime from Interweave to pop in here and answer your question, Eleanor- hold tight…
Small correction: Although these days they are grown in Peru, cochineal was originally cultivated in Oaxaca and is properly referred to as a Oaxacan insect.
The full text of the article does indeed credit Oaxaca as the origin of cochineal.
I subscribe to the cloth, paper scissors magazine through zinio – another interweave publication. Zinio has apps for various platforms (I use the iPad) and can also be viewed on a web browser on a computer, and has a variety of magazines to read beyond interweave publications. I really love magazines on zinio, especially getting foreign magazines. It’s sort of like apple’s newsstand. My paper magazines were just piling up and storing them was becomingn such a burden.
I also like the collage in color app by interweave. Lots of great artists, ideas, and video.
I like to take screenshots of pages or techniques I like and add them to my Evernote account. Since there are so many apps and magazine vendors on the iPad now, I find that a handy way to collate sources of inspiration from different sources. You can also add PDFs to Evernote, so that would be a great way to archive items, too.
Those are all great suggestions – thanks, Deb!
I can not about wires and beading, but that Colorways app may as well have been subtitled “made especially for Elizabeth in GR”!! ;)
Hi Eleanor, The desktop versions of our eMags that are purchased at InterweaveStore.com are not compatible with tablet devices, such as the iPad. They are two separate products: desktop eMags for people who don’t have tablets, and the iPad versions available in the Apple/iTunes app store. I hope this helps.
Also, I should note that the digital versions of our regular newsstand magazines like Cloth Paper Scissors and Interweave Knits (not the interactive, video-enhanced eMags) are now available several ways: 1) for immediate download at InterweaveStore.com as a PDF that can be read on your desktop or tablet device 2) through single-issue purchases or subscriptions at Zinio.com for the iPad or Android tablets or 3) through single-issue purchase or subscriptions at the Apple iNewsstand. Cheers, Jaime
P.S. I hesitate to post this because I don’t want to be too self-promoting, but because all of the comments have been so positive and showing interest, I want to pass along that most of the desktop eMags are on sale right now during Interweave’s annual Winter Wipeout Sale. LiveWire, normally $4.85 is $2.97. Colorways reduced to $2.99 from $4.99. (and no shipping charges :-) Just do an “emag” search at InterweaveStore.com