The Onion Tablet
The Onion is a shining example of excellent site-to-app translation, as sublime as the site itself is ridiculous. The app devotes as much screen space to actual content as humanly possible. Articles are displayed on their own page, and you can swipe between them to go forward and back. The entire Onion back-catalog is available and searchable, so if you vaguely remember something about President Clinton and a magic turtle, you can find it. It could use a couple more bells and a whistle or two — for instance, it would be nice to have it remember which articles you’ve already seen and either hide them or mark them somehow. But once you have the Onion app on your iPhone or iPad, there’s next to no reason to visit the actual site. Good job cheating yourself out of ad money, Onion folk!
That’s Entertainment: 3 iPad Apps for Browsing the Web’s Best Lulz
Learn How We Rate ##### Wired
A nice selection of sharing options, so you can still direct your Uncle Marty to that hilarious article about corn dogs.
1/10 A complete failure in every way
2/10 Sad, really
3/10 Serious flaws; proceed with caution
4/10 Downsides outweigh upsides
5/10 Recommended with reservations
6/10 Solid with some issues
7/10 Very good, but not quite great
8/10 Excellent, with room to kvetch
9/10 Nearly flawless
10/10 Metaphysical perfection
The Onion iPhone and iPad, free
Rating: 8 out of 10
Alien Blue
When you make a list of “essentially non-serious things people take very seriously,” put Reddit at the top. Then post it to Reddit, you’ll get lots of karma. Alien Blue is an app that takes Reddit very seriously, giving you a vast arsenal of tools to make browsing for pictures of cats in little outfits or women in even littler outfits as efficient as you can stand. Or, if you’re the more casual sort of meme-browser, you can just tap “Front Page” and start thumbing through the most distracting bits of interesting fluff the internet has to offer. Or, if words aren’t your thing, a handy thumbnail mode lets you skip all the talkity-talk and swipe one-handed through all the jpeggery, pngosity and giffiness your iDevice can stand.
WIRED Lets you access your registered Reddit subscriptions. Nice UI choices. Mark stuff read as you finish it.
TIRED Up and down arrows are for voting, but seem like they ought to be for page-turning, especially since you can’t turn pages outside of thumbnail mode.
Morrissey Exchange, free for iPhone; $4 for iPad
Rating: 9 out of 10
Cracked
Let’s put this in terms that would be at home on Cracked:
Four Mind-Blowing Reasons the Cracked Tablet App Sucks
Apparently It’s 1999 Again. Remember when every site had an annoying front page where you had to figure out what’s clickable and what’s not because the designer didn’t think you could figure out how to click on the word “video” without it being superimposed on an actual picture of a video screen? Cracked remembers. At least the iPad version does; the iPhone version more sensibly sends you straight to the action.
Size Doesn’t Matter. The images in the section devoted to reader-contributed Photoshop jobs take up only about a third of the iPad and can’t be zoomed. Or saved. Or copied. So good luck reading the “hilarious” text on the posters in “Thirty Movies Improved by Starring Betty White.” On the iPhone the images take up the entire screen — they’d have to — but you still can’t do anything interesting with them.
No Soup for You. Like Cracked‘s articles? Have a whopping 26 or so to read! The other categories are similarly truncated. If you want any more, you’re going to have to visit Cracked‘s website. But it’s probably just as well there’s a limited selection, because …
In Search of Search. There’s no search function. Want to find that one article you kinda liked that mentioned Danny Trejo? Visit the Cracked website! Really, the entire app could arguably be replaced by one big button reading “Click here to visit Cracked‘s website.”
WIRED Cracked articles are the perfect length and intellectual depth to read a couple while waiting to be seated at the family restaurant of your choice.
TIRED Like a handful of Pringles, it’s either too much or not enough.
Demand Media, $1 for iPhone, free for iPad
Rating: 5 out of 10
