(Guillaumier assures me that the improved Gerty design sensibilities will migrate back to Marvin over time, particularly in the upcoming Marvin 3.0 update.) While I may not agree with all the choices made, it's clear that Gerty was grown to put design first. Every menu, every presentation, every feature has been enhanced for visual clarity. When using the app, I kept wishing more and more features would migrate back so Marvin could share the beautiful menus and font choices. In terms of visual design, Gerty puts Marvin to shame. Little quotes here and there enliven the interface, emphasizing a profound connection between reading and the love of books. A drag on the book overview screen reveals statistics about your reading sessions.
A tap on the page brings up a set of tools for adjusting your presentation. You discover items almost accidentally, as the interface graciously defers to your natural interactions, offering features you hadn't thought to look for yourself. Guillaumier has spent a lot of extra effort adding these in with great subtlety. Like Marvin, Gerty (free with $3.99 IAP to unlock all features) is packed with product highlights. Whether in the class room or on a real-world journey, the greater book experience could be collected and incorporated to build a richer ebook library. Users could annotate texts, add tagging, detail their progress, and more. Gerty, his new passion project, would allow users to bring those elements into their books, creating annotations and journals related to book content. To him, books involve the space, the reader, the learning, and the environment as well as the material on the rendered page. To Guillaumier, reading wasn't just an end-point, it was the beginning of an experiential process. Although Marvin has in no way reached its end of life, Gerty would re-imagine this space for a new audience.
Over time, Marvin had grown and grown based on user requests, created a very purposeful code base that really couldn't be re-directed the way he envisioned. What more needed to be said or developed in this space? Malta-based Guillaumier explained his motivation. When developer Kristian Guillaumier approached me to take an early look at his new ereader app Gerty, I was surprised.
Marvin does not support Mobi or PDF reading at this time. It's an absolutely fantastic app for reading DRM-free EPUB. There are too many incredibly useful features to mention, so go look at the product page.Īmong my favorites are the slide-to-dim when moving from a bright room to a dark one, perfect font adjustments, progress tracking, and so forth. It offered all the reading control I needed to immerse myself in stories. A US$3.99 app, Marvin, Megs insisted, was the ebook reader I'd been waiting for, and one that I could easily fall in love with.įeature rich, beautifully realized, Marvin quickly migrated to my iPad home page, and from there, onto my launch bar.
Earlier this year, on the recommendation of former TUAW lead Megan Lavey Heaton, I gave iBooks the heave-ho and installed Marvin on my iPad.