Made Simple for WebOS Review

If you are new to smartphones then the webOS platform can be a little overwhelming. The folks over at Made Simple Learning understand that and have made an app to try to ease the learning with their Made Simple for WebOS app.

At its core, the app is simply a PDF document. It even uses the default PDF Viewer as its backbone. What you get for the $4.99 is detailed explanations (1,500+ pages worth) of just about every feature that webOS has in it [ed. note: This app hasn't been updated since 12/15/09 so doesn't include the features of the latest versions of webOS]. This includes about a million screenshots that clearly walk you through everything.

The other thing that Made Simple has going for it is the book is very well laid out and they have implemented a lot of handy tools to help you get around easily. They have a button to help you find the descriptions of the Apps, a list of chapters and the table of contents. To further ease your way around they have an exhaustive list of bookmarks to help you jump to just about any topic.

The content of the app is great. I think it is very straightforward and explains everything very well. The problem I had with it is that it is shoehorned into the PDF Viewer rather than a native app of some sort. I know there are probably major technical hurdles for this but there are some basic things that make the app harder to use than necessary, I think.

The first thing isn’t really an ease of use thing but it still struck me as odd. The PDF Viewer has a share command built in. This allows you to send the PDF you are reading to anyone you want. When you load the Made Simple app for the first time they make you pinky swear that you won’t use this feature. With piracy the way it is nowadays this is just too easy.

The biggest issue I had was with searching. If you use the search tool of the PDF Viewer the bar to type in gets hidden behind the title bar that says Made Simple for WebOS. Furthermore, the search takes forever to find anything. I imagine that is because the document is 1,500 pages long. As I mentioned, there are tons of great navigational aids built into the document but nothing can replace a good search.

Another problem was the fact that you can’t swipe to change pages. Now this is really an issue with the PDF Viewer tool but because of all the screenshots and other goodies there are usually around 20 words on a single page so you have to change pages constantly. This makes the lack of a swipe gesture very pronounced.

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