my name is mwd

The FT iPad app versus the paper edition:

The FT iPad app is quite nice – it does a good job of capturing the feel of the paper, is up to date, and pleasant to read. It makes a good example of what you can do with the iPad as a way to structure your new media better than were it just a website on a tablet.

On the downside, you can’t share it over the breakfast table, and it doesn’t offer, or at least that I could find, all the content from the paper or website (no FT funnies section for instance, otherwise called the Fast Lane :), so the iPad won’t be replacing the paper version just yet of the FT Weekend, but it does fill in for the week day edition.

Update: My colleague Garry, who wrote an excellent summary of the iPad’s accessibility features, asked about whether they work with the FT app, which I’d not tried. Indeed they do – you can tap on headlines to hear them read, and when you double tap through to an article you can swipe the page to have the full story read out to you. Clearly there’s some areas where the iPad version shines over the paper version.