This app has some wonderful maps that will be very helpful in my research and as a general reference for my work. My main issue is that the app keeps crashing about three pages into the introduction. I can search for places and use the maps fine, but I also want to be able to actually use the introduction of the book as well. It would also be great if they could include some bibliographic references.
I'll want to give you five stars for what this thing is, which is an essential reference atlas for any classicist or for anyone with a passion for ancient history. It's truly brilliant, and we should applaud Princeton for publishing such a work at such an affordable price.
Unfortunately, I am obliged to give it one star because, as with other reviewers, the app keeps crashing about 3 pages into the ebook function. And that is the complete opposite of brilliant. I'm running the latest OS on an IPad2. Please fix this, Princeton. I want to read about what I'm looking at!
The app crashes after viewing about 3 pages of the written text (not the maps)
The first problem is a minor one: searching a place can finding the relevant map is somewhat slow. I don’t mean there are a number of steps involved in that, rather it takes a bit for the iPad to “think” its way through your search and find the correct maps.
The second problem is a major one: if you search a place, and that search yields the first map (“1 Internum Mare”) as a result, tapping that result will ALWAYS bring you to map 1a, instead of map 1. This is a major problem, since map 1a is a relatively minor map (“Fortunatae Insulae”) when compared to map 1 (a map of the entire Mediterranean and its shores; your standard map of the ancient world).
Other than those two complaints, this is a great app and very convenient to boot. It is much easier to have this atlas with me than to carry the large print edition around. The price may be steep for your average app, but the maps and information contained are worth the price.
The Barrington Atlas is a classic book. It is a spectacular atlas of the ancient Classical world and a reference that shows things you can't get easily (or sometimes at all) elsewhere.
The idea of having this big and expensive book turned into a portable and affordable e-book was a fine one. Making knowledge more available is a good thing.
But Princeton and the developers here are not presenting this as an e-book, they've offered it as an application in iOS. This looks like another potentially good idea: imagine if the artificial boundaries imposed by the need for pagination in a physical book could be gone, if the zoom function could actually take you in close (at least to major cities and important historical sites); if you could put two sections of the map into custom windows and juxtapose them (or at least toggle back and forth between them); and so on. The only limitations on what could have been done were the imagination and budget of the developers.
Unfortunately, those limitations appear to have been considerable. What we are presented with is more or less an e-book translation of the physical book, blocked from being able to be displayed on a desktop Mac, where some of its limitations could be tempered by the greater display size of the desktop, by being presented as an app instead of as an e-book.
Had Princeton chosen to do so, it could have enhanced the contents of this book with the many resources available to iOS app developers. Applications like the spectacular realizations of The Waste Land and Shakespeare Sonnets point towards what is possible. Within the framework of the Barrington maps, all sorts of information about the physical universe depicted in them would have been possible, including more on topography, climate, perhaps even expanded maps of the major cities: Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Thessalonica, the Greek City-States, etc. It should be possible, for example, to take a virtual trip across the Via Egnatia and "see" the physical features of the landscape and the population centers along the way (this would not necessarily have had to be an animation, the information could have been in words, story-boards, other image-types, etc.)
The point of the original Barrington was to enable its users to have a reliable guide to the places and physical settings of long ago. Within the limits of its time's technology, it did a fine job of this. Our time's technology is well past that of the book's creation and it is a shame that so little of it had a hand in this new rendering.
The original content of the book is faithfully delivered here, although with inexplicably limited zooming and equally inexplicably awkward page-to-page navigation (if you expand a page to look at it, you must go back to the default zoom before you can page forward), and at a fair price. We should be grateful for that.
On the other hand, as with so much in Classical History, it seems that there were great opportunities presented that were ignored.
If you are a scholar or a student of this period, this is a resource that you should have. It's good for what it is but a mere shadow of what it could have been.
This set of maps has just what I was looking for: a portable atlas of antiquity I can access easily. My only gripe is the zoom does not go far enough. On my iPad 2 I have to keep my fingers split to view detail.
Useful, easy to use and incredibly detailed.
Brydonea
@orbilius
HerbBauer
Achilles Peleides
Chakwin
Zacctastic
Cappadocian
