Magazine Viewer

[Andrew McKelvey 1]

For reasons I won't go into my copy of the magazine gets held up at the door because of my wife's Corvid restrictions, it could contaminate me. I have over the last few months been viewing the latest magazine via the subscriber page on the website but find the viewer very poor.

I have looked at numerous posts going back to early 2019 of subscribers bemoaning the quality of the viewer and I too have had issues. I normally want to read the magazine last thing at night while settling down in bed by using my iPad but the constant zooming in a out to read the text does not make it an enjoyable experience, even on my desktop computer Windows 10 with a 21" monitor it isn't that good.

I have no problems with things like Kindle viewer and PDF viewer I have bought more than a few books to read during lock down on my iPad and the quality of viewing is excellent.

I even tried pocket mags thinking my subscription may let me get at the mag but no joy.

I was thinking of going to a digital subscription but if this is the quality of the viewer, I won't be, am I missing some thing is there an add on I'm missing, how can I improve my viewing satisfaction, this seems to have been complained about for a long time now so surely there is a solution.

[Andrew McKelvey 1]

Do I assume that with no replies that no one has any thing good to say about the online viewer and that the digital subscription is not fit for purpose?

[Lone_Wolf]

Hi Andrew yes I agree the Pocketmags viewer software is rather poor. I think because it sort of works there is no incentive to improve it. Much more effort has been put into locking down what users can do and prevent anyone other than the subscriber viewing the content than the actual user experiance.

It is possible to have both, just not with Pocketmags.

I think having my entire magazine collection on a tablet of some sort is the way to go. Don't think printing magazines is a good use of the world's resources nowadays. Plans yes.

Edited By Lone_Wolf on 08/10/2020 22:17:05

[Former Member]

[This posting has been removed]

[FlyinBrian]

I recently subscribed to digital (as well as print) but can not find how to read it online.

[David Ashby - Moderator]

The digital archive is found by clicking on 'magazines' at the top of the page Brian (just under the 'S' of Arrows in the advert).

Then select RCME.

Then the month you require.

Edited By David Ashby - Moderator on 09/10/2020 10:26:07

[Tim C]

I have to agree the new viewer is not good,

Unusable on win 10 Chrome at the moment with

An Error Has Occurred

I'm sorry but we can't process your request at this time (bad referrer)

[David Ashby - Moderator]

Tim,

Have a look at the end of this thread here where the problem was highlighted along with a fix.

[Gordon Whitehead 1]

If anyone understands the fix and how to apply it, please can they explain the process here?

Gordon

[Tim C]

There is nothing obvious with the browser settings that cause the issue, it was working and now is not

[Andrew McKelvey 1]

The problem described above is a problem with page coding and how the browser reads the html code, not really some thing we can fix at our end, so must be some thing the programmer / developer has implemented, It may just boil down to incompatibility in browsers after all the developer should test his code against all known browsers or make explicit mention that not all browsers work.

The point I was making is that there are viewers out there like Amazon Kindle Viewer which will allow you to see secure items and will remember what page you are on and at what magnification you prefer to read at and repaginate the pages accordingly and do it across a whole library of available items, even if the settings are different for each book/magazine. After all that's what cookies are for!

In my view it shouldn't be to difficult to give us a viewer that satisfys the user experience rather than getting what the developer wants to give us.

Edited By Andrew McKelvey 1 on 09/10/2020 13:34:06

[Gordon Whitehead 1]

This is not a new problem for this publisher. It occurred in July 2018 with the Model Engineer archive and from what I can see in this thread remained unsolved.

[Andrew McKelvey 1]

Gordon, I completely agree this isn't a new problem, it probably coincides with a change that the web developer has made to the site, I raised a new thread because I thought that in the intervening months / years some thing would have been done to correct the issue and I may have missed it, I am not on here daily..

As far as I know support for Flash Player stops from this month so all those web pages that support flash have had to be changed for some thing that is supported, security and all that, did the old viewer run on Flash, I don't know but something has changed that we can't correct at this end, but to re-iterate there are web sites out there that have secure content that you can view without the hassle we have to endure.