Over the course of this summer, we have witnessed the launch of a number of visually stunning applications for the iPad, including Pulse, Flipboard, Fotopedia Heritage and Discover. Now, one of the best and most popular photojournalism blogs, Boston.com’s The Big Picture, is joining the fray with the launch of its own iPad app. About three times per week, the Big Picture features a new set of photos around a specific topic or news event.
Thanks to the iPad’s great screen and the editorial team’s skill in choosing the best images, scrolling through these collections makes for a great visual experience. Most of these sets include somewhere between 35 and 50 captioned images from a wide variety of sources.
This is, of course, not the first iPad app that highlights great photojournalism. The Guardian, for example, was among the first news organizations to launch an iPad app that focused solely on displaying interesting news photos. Reuters, too, offers a similar application. These apps, however, tend to focus on one picture per day, while Boston.com’s app doesn’t update daily, but focuses on displaying a larger set of images.
The only real complaint we have about the app is that it doesn’t pre-cache images. On a fast connection, the resulting delay is negligible, but on 3G or a slow broadband connection, the delays are often very noticeable and distract from the overall user experience.
The Big Picture iPad app (which is also compatible with the iPhone), is now available for $2.99.
