A few weeks ago I introduced you to Flipboard, the iPad tool that pulls together various articles on a theme into “magazines”. Well today I’ve discovered another new tool that actually lets you create an online magazine from scratch …
Glossi uses a drag-and-drop interface to let you add text, images and even video to a magazine. The site gives you a few template pages to start with but you can edit every element, move text and image boxes around and even set up pages from scratch, incorporating multiple columns, audio, animation, PDFs and more.
I spent about an hour playing with Glossi this afternoon and I can certainly see that it has a lot of potential. I created a small magazine from a few blog posts and while the site (which is still in beta mode) has a few glitches, it was reasonably easy to navigate the site and add my content. I found it quite difficult to highlight text without moving the text boxes, and when I did want to move an element it wasn’t always immediately clear how to do so – but these are little niggles that I’m sure will get easier with practice. It did take me quite a while to work out how to put everything together, so my magazine is a little more amateur than I would have liked, but given more time I think I’ll be able to use this quite productively.
Anyway, you can see my effort below – I’d love to know your thoughts, and how you might be able to use Glossi!
