BrowZine 4+

Some issues recently

I love this app - it’s sleek, easy to use, and has many of the journals I typically cite. Unfortunately for the past couple of weeks, I haven’t been to access any articles. When I try to open an article it says there’s an authentication error. I can still access everything normally through the browser version, so I’m thinking something changed in the latest app update? Looking forward to the next update to return to normal, thanks :)

Developer Response ,

We apologize that you've been having trouble using BrowZine. Please contact us at support@thirdiron.com so we can help you with your authentication problem. Tell us your organization and the email address you used to create a BrowZine account, and we'll get this straightened out!

Potential is there but UX development is slow

This app is excellent for keeping up to speed on journals that i read when paired with access granted through my institution. Also the user interface is quite past century. Not a big inconvenience but probably not for millennial reader. Competitors rely on a model that takes after other social media sites (think continuous scroll of articles curated using an algorithm) vs this app which relies on the old age phenomenon of getting a physical copy of the journal and taking your time to browse through its content. The reality is that in this day and age modern readers do not like to be tied down to journal boundaries but rather appreciate a curated list of knowledge.
It also lacks in identifying the special interests of its readers and then coming up with suggestions.

Loved the previous version

I have been using Browzine like it’s my Sunday morning paper for about a year now. Until the latest update, I was very happy with the app and encouraged my friends (fellow grad students) to download and use it. I could even easily send papers to my friends if it looked like something they would be interested in. Alternatively, when a paper seemed very useful to my research, I found it incredibly easy to export the pdf to Zotero for reading and taking notes. It was an awesome, smooth experience.

I’m not sure what happened with the latest update. I now have to repeatedly log back in, have to decide whether I want to read the article’s html or see the pdf before previewing it, and when I send a paper to Zotero, it will not send the pdf.

These problems have made using Browzine on my iPad cumbersome.

I wish I had the old version where none of these problems were happening. Until the next version, which will hopefully fix these issues, I’m no longer encouraging people to download it on their iPads.