Zinio - availability? It's here!!!

[Fofer]

None of my magazines are showing. I tried all the tips in this thread. Tapped back and forth, uninstalled and reinstalled, logged out and back in, deleted the zinio folder... all to no avail. Still nothing. What a tease

So I emailed Zinio tech support at the form linked to above, and anxiously await their answer.

Sort of a bummer; we've waited this long, the app looks nice and all... but if we can't connect to our libraries then it's kind of a non-starter.

[everythingsablur]

Originally Posted by Fofer

None of my magazines are showing. I tried all the tips in this thread. Tapped back and forth, uninstalled and reinstalled, logged out and back in, deleted the zinio folder... all to no avail. Still nothing. What a tease

So I emailed Zinio tech support at the form linked to above, and anxiously await their answer.

Sort of a bummer; we've waited this long, the app looks nice and all... but if we can't connect to our libraries then it's kind of a non-starter.

Same problem for me. 4 magazine subscriptions (have had for years, I think my library goes back to 2002 or so) currently, but nothing at all shows up in my library. All of my subscriptions shows as webOS compatible when I look at them on the website. Even bought another subscription I've been meaning to. Nada.

I'm sure it's just growing pains, and I remain hopeful, but it is a bit disappointing this didn't work right out of the box what with all of the lead time.

[shrxwin]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Natgeo I have subscribed to isn't available, but the July 2011 is given away as a sample? This doesn't make sense. Work-in-progress, but at least it is out, I was beginning to think it would never come.

NatGeo is Ipad/PC/Mac only according to the website. I didn't notice that when I subscribed last month, was bummed when I couldn't get on my Xoom and now TouchPad. but hopefully they can make it available someday!

meanwhile reading all the posts from today I'm very happy that it's gone smoothly for me. I turned off WiFi and could still read those I'd downloaded but of course not those that were just thumbnails waiting to download. fingers crossed it stays working for me and improves for everyone else!

Cheers, Clarice

[siobhanellis]

works great for me, unless I put the TP on the touchstone, then it stops downloading.

Siobhan

[HansTWN]

Originally Posted by shrxwin

NatGeo is Ipad/PC/Mac only according to the website. I didn't notice that when I subscribed last month, was bummed when I couldn't get on my Xoom and now TouchPad. but hopefully they can make it available someday!

meanwhile reading all the posts from today I'm very happy that it's gone smoothly for me. I turned off WiFi and could still read those I'd downloaded but of course not those that were just thumbnails waiting to download. fingers crossed it stays working for me and improves for everyone else!

Cheers, Clarice

In that case they really shouldn't supply a free sample of a magazine that is not actually available? And I would guess that NatGeo is one of the most widely read magazines. Well, I will sit and wait a while until all this is sorted out before I subscribe to anything else.

[Maruuk]

Originally Posted by jhoff80

No it's not. The FAQ is definitely poorly worded, but if you sign in once and then download your magazines, then you don't need an internet connection for subsequent times.

Unfortunately, half of the free samples either don't load, or only show blurry images.

Ah, so once you D/L what you need, you can stay offline, thanks, much better!

Sounds like they released way too early, buggyness abounds.

[monsignore9]

Just wanted to say that I am very content with this app.

Library synced fine, I am content with the reading experience in general.
Of course there is room for improvement (e.g. zooming in portrait mode), but I am already happy with it.
I don't care how many free magazines I can get - there are some (and I am grateful for this), but I haven't counted them.
I would have been happy with zero free magazines - all I have wanted for weeks was a Zinio app that works on my Touchpad, and that's what I have now.
Thanks! ;-)

I am sorry to hear that others have problems, but I hope Zinio will sort these out with updates.

Only thing I have not figured out yet is how to delete a magazine from the Touchpad (not from the library in the cloud!) after I have finished reading it there.

[Spyke]

Originally Posted by monsignore9

Only thing I have not figured out yet is how to delete a magazine from the Touchpad (not from the library in the cloud!) after I have finished reading it there.

If you use a file manager on the Touchpad, or more simply connect it to your PC and use a file manager there, you'll find that there's a folder called zinio in the internal folder that appears via USB.

In internal\zinio you'll find an xml file called library.xml that lists all the magazines and issues available to your account, and the magazine and issue number IDs are there (you may not be able to open that on your TP, but it should open in a browser on your PC).

The actual magazine downloads are held in the internal\zinio\magazines folder. There's a subfolder with the ID for each magazine and subfolders under those with the ID for each issue. These should contain a thumbnail cover.jpg for each issue, and a set of encrypted pdfs if you have downloaded them to your device.

From a PC, you can also see which issue is which simply by viewing the cover image in the issue folder.

I've experimented with simply deleting the magazine folders that I don't want (and leaving the xml file alone). This seems to work fine, though the magazine still appears to be displayed as downloaded on the Zinio app. Tap the thumbnail and it downloads again.

This works for me, as I can remove magazines that I don't want from my account online, but I daresay editing the issue out of the library.xml file would fix the app display. I'll experiment further when I have more time.

Hopefully the app will be updated at some point to allow us to delete downloaded content through the app itself.

At the moment, the app doesn't clean up the subfolders and cover thumbnails for magazines that you have removed from your account, so it would be nice if an update to the app removed these from the magazines folder as well (though they're not really taking up much space and users won't see them unless they go digging).

[titanium.rx8]

Just dowloaded and installed Zinio. Logged into my existing account and my prior magazine purchases were in the library ready to download. Haven't had any time to explore further yet, but so far so good. Looks great.

[monsignore9]

@Spyke
Thanks a lot for the instructions, that's helpful indeed!

[Fofer]

I wonder why the Zinio library of subscriptions is loading for some folks, but not others? Seems... odd.

[everythingsablur]

Originally Posted by Fofer

I wonder why the Zinio library of subscriptions is loading for some folks, but not others? Seems... odd.

Too many individual variables for us to figure it out. Is it library size? Is it particular subscriptions? Is it age of account? Is it something about the device? I have 125+ issues dating as far back as 2002 somehow, for example. Do you want to go into what magazines, which issues, etc.? I have to imagine every Zinio user will have a different story.

Email support@zinio.com and they will ask you a bunch of questions so that the developers can figure it out. Here's part of their email:

**Note: All current issues from 2011 should appear as available on your WebOS device, if you find that any are missing, please provide the title of the magazine and issue date in your reply.

Initial reports are that it can take up to 5 mins for users with large libraries to have the Read page populate with all their entitlements. You can try switching between the Read and Shop pages to get the issues to appear and move the process along.

Additionally if you have a large library(several years’ worth of issues), some users have reported that the App crashes when trying to populate your library.

To help our developers investigate the problem please provide information such as the size of your Zinio library as well as how much free space you have on your WebOS device. If you are able to provide detailed step by step instructions so that we can attempt to reproduce the problem, it would be greatly appreciated.

I am passing all of this information on to developers for investigation, thank you for your patience.

[65fastback]

mine worked superb! pulled in all my mag's

[DDRx]

After 24 hours, here are some personal observations that users who haven't downloaded the Zinio app may want to consider before taking the plunge:

- May not work with large libraries. In my case, multiple magazine subscriptions since 2006. Nothing I tried resolved this.

- Will work with new accounts. The free 10 or 12 magazines that other users mentioned in this thread showed up properly after I signed up. I did a test subscription via goreadgreen.com and that worked as well.

- Zinio breaks Adobe Reader. Well it still works, but it's next to useless since it's littered with hundreds if not thousands of encrypted page fragments. Could be just me though since nobody else on this thread has reported it. Would appreciate some help if you know how to get around this.

- It may take several tries to get the sync right. My first attempt at downloading the free magazines resulted in blurry, unreadable pages when I would pivot to portrait mode. Waiting nearly an hour to check if this was just a download issue didn't help. I finally deleted the app and started from scratch. Portrait mode works properly now for all the downloads, so mostly good. I say 'mostly good' because I have 3 publications (Esquire, HBR, PC Mag) that do not display thumbnails - just blank boxes where the images should be.

While this feels more like a beta version than an actual release, I'm still pretty happy that Zinio is on the Touchpad, and I'm hoping that we eventually get a release that's at par with the iPad's v2.12.

[Sukiyaki]

My new account works still. My original one that is a month old doesn't. I don't have a large library. I have woman's day, pc mag, a single copy of cosmo I purchased and the samples. I will email their support as recommended, but I probably won't get to it until this weekend.

-- Sent from my HP TouchPad using Communities

[jhoff80]

Originally Posted by DDRx

- Zinio breaks Adobe Reader. Well it still works, but it's next to useless since it's littered with hundreds if not thousands of encrypted page fragments. Could be just me though since nobody else on this thread has reported it. Would appreciate some help if you know how to get around this.

More than likely just none of us noticed yet.

If Zinio changed their app to look in a .zinio folder instead of a zinio folder, then the webOS indexer would ignore it.

Anyway, I decided to try an ESPN subscription and this app is worthless. Including the 2 issues of ESPN, I've got 8 magazines downloaded.

New Scientist: Stuck at "Loading..." despite having already downloaded it.
ESPN issue 1: Haven't read the whole thing, but works perfect so far, in portrait and landscape
Outdoor Photographer: Stuck at Loading.
Home Theater: Stuck at Loading.
Spin: All pages blurry in portrait. Most pages blurry in landscape.
PC Magazine: All pages blurry in landscape. Most work in portrait, except the pages are cropped (look at the add for Zinio, page 4).
Esquire: Stuck at Loading.
ESPN issue 2: All pages blurry in portrait. Most pages blurry in landscape.

I thought maybe that it was a server issue with lots of people getting the free stuff at once last night, but this second issue of ESPN supposedly downloaded just now, but it's not working at all.

So only 1 of 8 magazines works entirely correctly. That should not be the case.

Unfortunately, the PC (Adobe AIR based ) client is only slightly better in that it actually displays my magazines, but it's a poor interface.

[Scotland]

>>- Zinio breaks Adobe Reader. Well it still works, but it's next to useless since it's littered with hundreds if not thousands of encrypted page fragments. Could be just me though since nobody else on this thread has reported it. Would appreciate some help if you know how to get around this.

I can confirm that this behavior is on mine too. Hopefully, zinio can change their directory to be hidden as suggested by jhoff80.

webOS itself does not help this situation either - since webOS has no scrollbar element (Android does not have one that you can drag but at least gives you a visual clue to how long the list is), it is impossible to know how long the list is. Fortunately all my PDFs start with letters before the letter P (all the fragments are Page1, Page2, etc) so the PDFs I care about are still at the top in the Reader app (for now).

I emailed Zinio Support about my missing magazine issues in my library - will report back on the results.

[everythingsablur]

Originally Posted by DDRx

- Zinio breaks Adobe Reader. Well it still works, but it's next to useless since it's littered with hundreds if not thousands of encrypted page fragments. Could be just me though since nobody else on this thread has reported it. Would appreciate some help if you know how to get around this.

Originally Posted by jhoff80

More than likely just none of us noticed yet.

If Zinio changed their app to look in a .zinio folder instead of a zinio folder, then the webOS indexer would ignore it.

Originally Posted by Scotland

I can confirm that this behavior is on mine too. Hopefully, zinio can change their directory to be hidden as suggested by jhoff80.

In the mean time kjhenrie has updated his PDF Reader patch to prevent QuickOffice / Adobe Reader from seeing Zinio's PDF files. Works great and adds some other missing PDF reader functionality.

Thread: http://forums.precentral.net/3235169-post4.html
Download: http://forums.precentral.net/webos-p...ml#post3194859

I have Zinio running with a new account as well just to see the free magazines until they sort out the blank library issues. By and large I think it works pretty well. Sure pages sometimes render blurry, but if I back out and zoom in again, or give it a few seconds, it usually sorts itself out. Would love more zoom levels though...

[k4ever]

I love this app! Good work Zinio team and thank you for supporting the TouchPad! I've already subscribed to Reader's Digest and I am working on transferring my paper subscription of Motor Trend over. I just bought a Popular Mechanics magazine so I will wait until next month to start that subscription. I really like the fact that you offer some free magazines to start with. Lets me test the app and feel comfortable with it. There are some bugs in the app so pat yourselves on the back for me, then get back to work making some updates! I am now a loyal customer!

[Fofer]

I have four current subscriptions. None of them (nothing in my library at all, actually) appears in the Zinio app on my Touchpad. I've tried all the troubleshooting steps mentioned in here. Nothing works.

I've emailed Zinio's tech support, and it's been a few days now. No reply.

Quite honestly, the promise of Zinio on the Touchpad was the primary reason I was excited about this device.

After waiting this long while, only to be caught by this show-stopping bug... this feels like some kind of cruel joke.