The Elements: A Visual Exploration
$13.99
Current Rank:
#1405
Screenshots
Description
App Details
- Category:
- Books
- Release Date:
- Apr 01, 2010
- Homepage:
- http://periodictable.c...
- Publisher:
- Element Collection, Inc
- Is this your app?
- Claim it!
Stephen Fry, one of the first independent reviewers to experience The Elements, tweets: “Best App of all Theodore Gray Wolfram Periodic Table. Everything is animated and gorgeous. Alone worth iPad.” Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing blogs “Itʼs dazzling—it makes science feel like magic in your hands.”
You start off at a living periodic table where every element is shown with a smoothly rotating sample. To read about tin, tap the tin soldier. To read about gold, tap the gold nugget. Immediately you see the sample filling nearly the entire screen, photographed to razor sharpness and rotating around a complete circle in front of your eyes.
Beside that is a column of facts and figures, each of which can be tapped to bring up rich detail and current information through the embedded Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine. Tap the Wolfram|Alpha button for gold and it tells you the up-to-the-minute market price, along with a hundred other facts about gold.
But it's when you go to each element's second page that the real magic starts. Carefully photographed objects representing the element fall down, rotating a fraction of a turn as they settle in to form a beautifully composed page. Every one of these objects, well over 500 in total, is a freely rotatable, live object that you can examine from all sides.
Use one two, three, or ten fingers to spin as many objects as you like at once. Each object responds effortlessly to your touch, and objects can be "thrown" to set them spinning. Some pages even include live video clips of experiments showing interesting properties of the elements.
Double-tap any object to bring it up full screen. Tap again and the image splits into a pair of stereo 3D images. Using inexpensive 3D glasses (available from http://periodictable.com/ipad) you can see all 500 objects pop off the screen in 3D, and you can spin the objects, in 3D, with the touch of a finger. You can’t get much more virtually real than that.
But The Elements is much more than a technology showcase. It’s based on the best-selling hard cover edition of The Elements by Theodore Gray, Popular Science Magazine’s Gray Matter columnist. You may start off looking at the pretty pictures, but once you start reading the book, you’ll be hooked on the fun stories and fascinating facts.
If you had a bad experience with chem class in school, this book is the antidote. If you or someone you know is afraid chemistry is going to be their most boring subject, this book will show them that there’s a lot more to the periodic table than a bunch of numbers and letters.
If you have an iPad, you really need this book, if only to find out just how far into the future of books it can take you. But you’re going to get a whole lot more out of it than just a gee-whiz experience.
Praise for the Hardcover Edition
“This glorious book is more than just a guide to the elements; it will fundamentally deepen your appreciation of the substances that make up our world.” –Oliver Sacks, Author of Awakenings and Uncle Tungsten
“This is the element book that in style and content outshines all element books! The photographs are fantastic in their mod layout on black. In the accompanying short texts, in a few choice words, Gray sketches utility, delves into history, and isn’t afraid to make sharp comments about the world. My reaction: elemental delight.”–Roald Hoffmann, writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry
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There are plenty of pronouncements about "the future of the book" when it comes to the increasing popularity of e-books and the steady release of new digital literature apps. Indeed, the ability to add video, voice-over, animation, and annotation all point to the great potential when literature becomes electronic, and in coming years we're sure to see a number of new creations that will challenge our definitions of "the book." But the while the possibilities of electronic literature and enhanced e-books sound good in theory, often they fail to deliver in practice. There are a lot of reasons why this occurs: it can be costly to add video or animation, and the integration with the text itself isn't always seamless or sensible. With this in mind, there are a lot of reasons to expect why an iPad version of one of the 20th century's most important poems, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste
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By Rene Ritchie, Sunday, Nov 14, 2010 | ‘Tis the season to be gifting and with iPhone and iPad being pretty much the perfect tool for students, there will be lots of elementary, high school, and college kids to shop for this year. That means not only devices like iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all wrapped up and ready to go, but all the great apps and accessories that go with them. Do you know someone special who’s in school? If so, here’s TiPb helpful holiday gift guide! Don’t need anything for a student? Check out the recommendations anyway, something great might still catch your eye. If not, no worries, we’ll have plenty more holiday gifts guides coming your way this month! We don’t know about you but our kids have pretty much put aside their (or more likley our!) iPod touches and gone head-over-heels for the big, bright screened iPad.
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...Elements: A Visual Exploration - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-a-visual-exploration/id364147847?mt=8 #iTunes...
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The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia -
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Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00
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The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia -
Posted
Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00
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Editor-in-Chief, iLounge Published: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Category: iPod, iPhone, and iPad Gems: Apps, Games + More Even though we don’t buy all or even most of our music from the iTunes Store, we give Apple serious credit for what iTunes and the iPod accomplished for the music industry—a unified, simple, and reasonably-priced interface for buying and playing music either on computers or on the go. Now Apple is trying to replicate that model with iBooks on the iPad, a free application that lets users buy and read books from major publishers, building upon Amazon’s previous work with the Kindle family of digital book readers. But unlike Apple’s approach to music, which started with a computer-based downloading and playback solution that extended to numerous portable devices, iBooks enters the world at a disadvantage: for the time being, it works only on the iPad, and the books Apple sells aren’t readable on
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The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia -
Posted
Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 UTC +00:00
Let’s set aside the question of whether you should get an iPad and suppose you already bought one last weekend. You probably floated home and loaded it with a few whiz-bang apps and maybe even passed it around to your friends. At some point in all the euphoria, you may also have wondered whether this device is just a trophy or something you can actually use. Such self-doubts can be easily cast aside, providing you delve a little more deeply into the App Store than the Top 100 list — and are ready to open the wallet again. If you budget around $100 for a few new and upgraded apps, you can easily make the iPad into much more of a constant companion than something you just trot out when the neighbors are watching. Start with productivity apps, because a mobile device is most valuable when it lets you work anytime,
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Popular Science takes an in-depth look into the makings of The Elements: A Visual Exploration for the iPad, the app that's had many reviewers nearly swooning with giddy geek pleasure. The article is written by the original book's author and Wolfram Research's co-founder, Theodore Gray, who described the experience as the chance to create something that "Harry Potter might check out of Hogwarts' library." The article is a fantastic read and is definitely worth checking out, especially if you have any interest in getting into media publication for the iPad, and how to design dynamic pages that Photoshop nor InDesign simply can't pull off. They took a library of nearly 350,000 images shot for the original book, combined it with a page layout tool constructed from scratch with Mathematica and added a runtime application code to turn those pages (processed on the fastest 8-core Mac Pro out there) into a beautiful
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When the Apple iPad was announced in late January, techies across the Web carped endlessly about what was wrong. It lacked a camera. It couldn't do videoconferencing. The bezel around the edge of the screen was too big. It wouldn't support Flash video. Worst of all, the Holodeck option wasn't truly immersive 3-D with full-on hot tub time-travel functionality. By contrast, if you watched Steve Jobs' speech announcing the iPad, you might have noticed that, throughout his demo, he kept commenting on how the iPad "just works." Other Apple execs swooned about how the iPad was "cool and easy to use" or, even, "magical." The geek-elite would have none of it. The tech blog Engagdet retorted "Magical? Really? Doesn't seem that magical to us!" PCWorld complained "Apple's iPad Just a Big iPod Touch." I had my doubts, too. So, when Apple provided me with an iPad a week ago, I was curious to see which side was closer to
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Reviews
Stunning
Ketzler
Version: 1.0.1
Version: 1.0.1
This looks absolutely stunning! It's the app that I am most excited to check out tomorrow!
This is what the future of books looks like
Ragfield
Version: 1.0.1
Version: 1.0.1
This is what the future of books looks like. The Elements: A Visual Exploration isn't just an electronic version of the paper book, it's so much more. Sure it contains roughly the same information--the reference material, the fun facts and interesting stories, the stunning high resolution photos--but this app makes full use of the interactive capabilities of the iPad to deliver an experience that can't be matched with a physical book (or any other electronic book platform, for that matter).
The book devotes two "pages" to each element of the periodic table. The first contains a beautiful rotating 3D sample of the element and all the useful reference information. This includes handy built-in access to WolframAlpha computable knowledge. Want to know the current price of gold? It's there.
The second page for each element gets into the interesting stories and fun facts. Additionally, this page includes a number of smaller 3D objects, all of which rotate at the touch of a finger (try to see how many you can get going at once). Then, by double-tapping one of these samples you get a bonus stereo 3D view of it. I was a little skeptical of the usefulness of this feature until I actually tried it with the cheap 3D glasses (which can be ordered online). I was completely shocked at how well it worked.
The Elements is a great example of how authors and publishers can take their content to the next level by creating a rich, immersive experience. The app also showcases the incredible interactive features of this great new device. From the incredibly entertaining opening song & animation, to the stunning, high quality, interactive element samples, to the detailed reference material, to the entertaining text (if you can take your eyes off the samples long enough to read it), this book is extraordinary.
