A New Kind Of Science App Reviews

Looks great on the iPad, and is page-for-page identical to my printed version of the book. Text is super clear. Illustrations look great, and you can pinch to zoom in on the various automata. It's great to have this wonderful and thought-provoking book available on my iPad, and this is far and away the best example of technical ebook publishing I have seen.

App shows up in list of 'May slow down your iPad' applications, and will not work with the next version of iOS unless it is updated. It's also very annoying that reading position is not saved. It might be better to publish to iBooks etc but then we'd all have to buy it again. So please update the app, Wolfram Media!

This app unfortunately looks terrible on the retina displays. As well, I have had it crash numerous times, with some pages refusing to load entirely. Barebones in terms of features, with an extremely rudimentary navigation. Still, it's only a book, I just expected more from a technology company.

I am also having trouble with book navigation now. None of the controls in the top menu bar are working. Does the app need updating because of iOS 5 so that the controls work again? It's only version 1.0 now.

This is simply a PDF of the original. Not only is there none of the standard ebook interactivity - note taking, links, lookups, etc - but Wolfram missed a great opportunity to add real value by allowing the reader to run and interact with the cellular automata examples.

I purchased this after Stephen Wolfram stated on his blog that he had waited for an appropriate electronic medium to create this but was unable to find one, until the iPad. While I agree with the other reviews that his is nothing special, I had to purchase it to find out.

Great book, wonderful content. Horrible app! C'mon you genius types can do better than that, yes? How about some basics like bookmarking, highlighting, etc.?

Basic ebook features like automatic bookmark of where one left off are missing. If you reopen the app it forgets where you were and instead reverts to the cover page! Annoying!

While this ebook is certainly easier to carry than the printed edition, the lack of even a simple bookmark function to remember where you left off is completely ridiculous.

As another reader wrote, this is just a gussied up PDF version of NKS. The upside of having this as an app is that I can now actually read NKS (been meaning to for years) without having to lug it around. So, now I am well on my way to reading this fascinating book. The downsides: 1) no search, 2) it doesn't always open to the last place you left off. If I don't go back into the app within a day it seems to forget my place and drop me in the TOC - BOO! 3)No way to make notes, or hilight passages to email myself/capture ideas..double, triple, quadruple BOO! Given Wolfram's close association with Touch Press it's weird that they opted to release NKS in this hobbled format. I am hoping that they are going to update the app with additional functionality soon!

This is a tremendous disappointment, and a stain on the author's reputation. The text is too small to read easily in portrait and the wrapper app doesn't do landscape. You can expand the text a little by losing the borders, but then it won't readily page turn !!! So each page read consists of expand, read, shrink. That interrupts the flow of attention, making it virtually unusable ( page turns need to take less than a second, 'cos the current context is held in short term memory and lasts between 0.5 and1.5 secs). This is a cheap attempt to get a mid life kicker out of a book, it is a missed opportunity to use the _compute_ platform of the iPad to demonstrate the _computational_ principles that Stephen is trying to illustrate. I look forward to the elements-style appbthat this subject truly deserves.

Great book, but App always opens to the wrong page and crashes constantly.

This would've been better as an ebook instead of as an application. It lacks most of the nice features you'll find in the kindle or iBook ebooks. With such dense and interesting content it sure would be nice to be able to select texts and take notes! Not up to par.