magazines

Now you can read your favorite online materials while you're offline.

First, you'll want to grab a copy of the app. You can get Google Currents for Android, or Google Currents for iPhone.

Step 1: Open the app and select the Google account you'd like to sync with Currents, or add a new account.

After browsing through the tutorial slides, you'll have access to the app. Now you can start customizing the app to your liking.

Step 2: On the Library tab you'll notice that Google has added some magazine-style content for you … Read more

"Congress Accidentally Approves Arts Funding."

Did that headline come from a serious news outlet or did you just get duped by The Onion? A new addition to the AppStore called Real or Onion challenges you to a game of spot the satire.

Gelf Magazine co-founder David Goldenberg came up with the idea after pausing for a second to question the sincerity of a Reuters headline ("Rap music glamorizes drug use - study").

The game is simple. You're presented with a headline and it's your job to determine the source. Based on your guess, you'll either be taken to a mainstream news site or to the original article on The Onion, along with results that compare your overall score with that of to other players.… Read more

As the year is coming to close, many companies step back and take stock of the decisions they have made over the last 12 months and determine if they are heading in the right direction. For Hearst Magazines, finally giving in to Apple's steadfast App Store rules has proved a wise--and lucrative--choice.

Talking to Reuters this week, Hearst Magazine President David Carey said that he expects to reach a million digital subscribers by the end of 2012, due in large part to the success of Apple's iPad and the ease of the new-to-iOS 5 Newsstand, which makes subscribing … Read more

Muzine is a music news app for iPad that lets you read the latest music topics in an easy-to-read format, or lets you customize your feeds to get news only from your favorite bands and sources. After launching the app, you're given a slideshow of featured stories--strangely, you can't go to a story by tapping on it, but instead need to hit the Features button to get access to full stories. Even with this oversite, the columned layout of the stories in the Featured section makes browsing for music news incredibly easy and enjoyable. A swipe upwards lets … Read more

Flipboard founder and CEO Mike McCue devoted his 10-minute Web 2.0 talk this morning to beauty, emotion, and design. Not data, the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

"When you want to create a hit, you've got to be willing to look away from the data," he said. The backdrop for McCue's mini-presentation? A picture of a lipstick red 1957 Jaguar XK SS. McCue referenced the classic car, in part, to demonstrate how something beautiful can elicit a visceral reaction. "It makes you feel good, like the Jaguar,&… Read more

This will either make you giggle or weep. And even if you giggle, it might be out of nervous fear for the future rather than joy.

For here is a 1-year-old who believes all media are now touch-screen-enabled. She seems not to understand that a magazine--Marie-Claire, in this example--doesn't take to pinching or prodding.

The video was posted by Jean-Louis Costanza, George's lost French cousin (not), currently the CEO at Orange-Vallee, a subsidiary of the France Telecom brand Orange.

I thank Laughing Squid for alerting me to Costanza's 1-year-old daughter, who will clearly be ahead of any … Read more

I've been reading magazines on my iPad for months. I didn't need iOS 5 to do it. I keep these apps--The New Yorker, Wired--in a separate folder on my iPad, called Reading. With iOS 5, that's no longer the case. A new baked-in app (or, rather, a type of smart folder) called Newsstand has now absorbed these apps into an iBooks-like wooden bookshelf.

Newsstand was one of the iOS 5 features that I'd been long awaiting, because I dreamed it would be a way of integrating books, periodicals, and all reading material into one destination. Alas, that's not the case here. Instead of being slotted into iBooks, Newsstand is a separate app. This means two icons to manage instead of one.

Also, I hoped that Newsstand would become a digital way of discovering not just magazines, newspapers, and journals, but a means of browsing covers and headlines from current issues. I browse real newsstands on the corner of 28th and Park, or at a bookstore, and based on what I see, I actually might buy an issue. A football preview came out this month? A cover story on a dinosaur discovery? Sure, I'll bite.

Newsstand on the iPad does none of this.… Read more

CNET's Bridget Carey does double duty on Loaded and The 404 Podcast today with all your latest tech headlines. Even without Wilson around, we can't escape Apple news, so today we're running down some of the best features from iOS 5 and giving you the real reason why Steve Jobs wore a black turtleneck.

It's not all Apple flavored, though- Samuel L. Jackson finally joined twitter, a costumed vigilante was apprehended by the Seattle police department, HP thinks you should spend more money on printer ink to save the print industry, and it's been a rough year for Sony, compounded by yet another PSN account breach and a Bravia television recall.

Enjoy the show!… Read more

HP today announced a partnership with Conde Nast that will deliver a handful of its most popular magazines (Allure, Details, Epicurious, Wired, Self, Golf Digest, etc.) to your home. Well, more specifically to your printer.

The press release shapes it as a "new digital content distribution medium that merges rich content and digital-to-print service," which really just means that readers can schedule automatic digital content delivery straight to HP's Web-connected printers, which will then use lots of ink to print out excerpts from magazines...in full color. This is the content solution that will save the print industry? Check your calendars; it's not April.… Read more