Read This: Mrs. Beatrice’s Favorite iPhone App

I was recently given the opportunity to test-drive the new McSweeney’s iPhone app, but since I’m still using a Treo for a while longer, I passed the invitation on to Mrs. Beatrice, who filed this report after experimenting with the app for a few days:

To begin, a confession: I have about six trillion iPhone apps. It’s actually slightly embarrassing, since I can’t find half of them at any given time (yeah, I know about the search function—that just seems like cheating, somehow), and a good portion of the other half are those games you’re obsessed with for about a day and then wonder why in the hell you spent the $0.99.

But I actually put the McSweeney’s app in a nice little corner that I can find easily, because it’s quickly become one of my favorites. You’ll find the same stuff you’ve learned to love in the print and Web versions of McSweeney’s—for example, “Ethical Dilemmas Involving Klondike Bars,” by Justin Hook, or “YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?,” by Francois Vincent (an embarrassing note about the latter piece—I got every single one wrong). But now you’ll be able to read it on the subway or other weird places you can’t get the Internet. And it updates every day, or nearly, so there’s something new to read each day you go back to the app.

McSweeney’s fans should definitely buy this app. And all the people who aren’t McSweeney’s fans must not have read McSweeney’s yet, so of course, they should buy the app, too.

4 October 2009 | read this |