The editors and staff of the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography ( JASE ) know that many of you look forward to receiving your paper copy of the Journal each month; the glossy feel of the paper, the weight of the issue in your hands, and the prospect of more novel insights with each turn of the page brings pleasure. We would bet that some of you save your copies from previous months and years, keeping them close at hand for easy and convenient access. It is the breadth of information contained in these issues that make them so valuable, and we work hard throughout the year to provide you with the timely, topical, and clinically oriented content that you rely upon. Going forward, we intend to make some further improvements in the type and quality of content. We understand that what may be of high interest to those readers involved in full-time clinical work may not be identical to the needs of readers who are active in clinical and/or basic research. Our intent is that the content in JASE is valuable to all of our readers.
Making JASE Content Available When and Where You Need It
While the editors focus on selecting the right content for JASE articles, we also know that the way in which people read is changing. Some of you may continue to grab the newspaper off the front porch every morning in order to catch up with the news, but we suspect that others have electronic subscriptions and now read the news online. On airplanes, some passengers find it comforting to turn the pages of paperback or hardbound books, but others use e-readers and appreciate the convenience of that format. Some lucky students, who used to go to and from school lugging book-laden backpacks that sometimes weighed as much as they did, and which would not fit in their lockers, now are able to access their texts using slim tablet computers that are easy to carry and use.
With this background, we know that many of you wish that you could take JASE with you, when you are on the go, using your iPad. The ability to use a tablet device to access articles detailing new directions in the field of echocardiography, and to view accompanying high quality illustrations and video files that show moving images, is a feature that many of our subscribers have requested. Last year, JASE was privileged to take part in the trial phase of Elsevier’s Personal Selections app, which gave readers a sense of how such an app might function, and the feedback we received indicated a significant interest among our readers. Over the past twelve months, we have been working hard with our publisher to bring you a dedicated digital tool that is unique to JASE. We wanted an app capable of delivering JASE’s print articles and multimedia supplements to you holistically and in an integrated manner, one that would let you take advantage of the full JASE experience wherever you have access to the Internet. JASE , and the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE), are delighted to announce that the new JASE app for iPad ( Figure 1 ) is now available for download!
The initial announcement of this new product took place in July 2012, during the ASE Annual Scientific Sessions in National Harbor, MD, and was met with great excitement. Readers who wanted the digital reading experience and intuitive integration of a JASE iPad app looked forward to the advanced functionality of this new product and were eager for it to become available. The process of developing and perfecting the app took a little longer than we had anticipated, but after several months of coordinated development between Apple and our publisher, Elsevier, we now are pleased to announce a product that does not just meet those goals, but exceeds them. The JASE iPad app can be accessed through the Apple App Store, and it is FREE! The app downloads quickly and easily into your newsstand and can be activated immediately using the same login information that you use to access the Journal directly through the online JASE portal (NOTE: this may not be the same login information that you use to access JASE through the ASE website. More details, and answers to frequently asked questions, can be found in this article).
The sleek interface of the app is enhanced by the iPad’s user-friendly operating system, which allows new users to acclimate quickly to this new way of browsing content. Through the app, subscribers are able to read and download new articles, forward articles of interest to themselves or to colleagues, save and bookmark their favorite articles for future reference, and search downloaded content with ease. Subscribers can watch embedded supplementary videos with the touch of the screen, and they can also select images from the articles, and E-mail those images to a colleague or to their own E-mail address. The app even provides digital note-taking capabilities, incorporating the convenience of electronic access with the experience of reading the print journal.
Of particular appeal is the ease with which existing subscribers will be able to incorporate the app into the ways they currently access Journal content. If you now access the online version of JASE directly through the journal’s website ( www.onlinejase.com ), the same Username and Password are the credentials you will use to access content on the iPad app. Logging in to the app is then as simple as logging into JASE’s Elsevier-hosted homepage. Additionally, the app allows you to download individual articles or entire issues to your iPad ( Figure 2 ), so that you can review this material even when there is no Internet connection, bringing you the traditional experience of reading paper copies of the Journal in a compact digital format.
