Carole Blake, joint-MD of literary agents Blake Friedmann has kindly reviewed the Gems and Jewels iPad app for FutureBook: By the time I was offered the code to review this app, I already owned it, having bought it the day it was released.  I had been waiting for it since it was casually mentioned in a talk at the FutureBook Conference last November, but I’d forgotten which publisher was cooperating with Touch Press in developing it.  Immediately the release was announced on Twitter I bought it.  Their groundbreaking (and award-winning) apps on astronomy - The Solar System and the periodic table - The Elements have fascinated me for months even though I was previously not interested in the subjects.  But jewellery? Bring it on.

When the app opens, a dazzling array of 21 gems and jewels appear on screen, all turning slowly: these represent a selection of prominent gem types. From that moment on, I was hooked.  It is mesmerising and seductive: every time I think I’ll spend a couple of minutes with it, I find 20 have passed.  Beautiful and informative, with so much to explore and manipulate.  The images on the iPad screen are simply stunning.

Most raw stones or pieces of jewellery can be swivelled at a variety of speeds (they slow down naturally), every one can be enlarged by ‘pinching’, and can be changed to be shown in their real size, against the others on the screen.  Once a piece is at full screen size, it can be tapped to produce rotatable 3D images (if you have the 3D glasses, which of course I do …).  Each gem’s caption can be flipped to show technical details. The additional paragraph of text on each screen can be opened up to show detailed essays which include geographic origins, the history of specific pieces of jewellery and the exploration of their role in human culture. 

The introduction has sections for beauty, durability, scarcity, weight, formation, synthetic gems, mining, ethics, folklore, birthstones and history (of the Field Museum’s Gem Halls). Every section contains beautiful graphics, images to enlarge, essays to open. The section on the process by which inorganic gems are formed by physical chemistry and geological processes, has a globe of the world where you can peel back segments (cloud layer, oceans, crust, mantle, core etc) like pieces of an orange: utterly fascinating.

The tab for the exhibit takes you to the Grainger Hall of Gems, which enables you to click on to each case in the exhibit with their gems in place. How much more exciting than even standing in front of the case though, is to have this app, in which many are rotating slowly, and all can be tapped to enlarge to fullscreen, or doubled for 3D viewing.  All captions can be read.

The index is comprehensive.  A piece listed as ‘Emerald (Rich Green Beryl)’ is indexed under Beryl, Emerald and Rich Green, and you can skip to any letter of the alphabet without having to scroll through every listing, plus there’s a ‘search’ facility.

My only (tiny) gripe: when you’re using the Index and then skip to a particular page/gem, pressing ‘back’ from there takes you to the beginning of the Index rather than to where you were in it previously.  A small irritation considering the many joys to be had with the app, and an indication of the level of interactivity, and ease of use, that it leads you to expect.

Each piece has a link to Wolfram|Alpha for data including classification, group, hardness scale, chemical compound etc.

One splendid addition is the song for the app (which you can turn off): Marilyn Monroe singing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.  Of course.

There are also some parts of the app particular to iPad2 which I couldn’t test … yet.

The app has been developed from the book  Gems and Gemstones by Dr Lance Grande & Allison Augustyn published by The University of Chicago Press in 2009.  The book retails in America for $45.00: at £7.99 this app is a real bargain.  All the pieces have been photographed afresh by Nick Mann, ‘working many long nights at the museum’ to take the multiple pictures necessary to make the rotating images. He was also the photographer for The Elements App.

These apps (along with The Solar System), all developed by Touch Press in partnership with a publisher, are the best I’ve ever used and now I can’t wait for release of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land (another produced with Faber), just to see what they will do with it.  Although, in the blurb for it that appears at the end of my Gems & Jewels app,  I’ve found a typo!  But I love the app so much I’ll forgive them what I would normally regard as a major sin.

All the gems and jewels are in one gallery of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago  (www.fieldmuseum.org), which was founded in 1893.  I bet Marshall Field, the museum’s first major benefactor would have been delighted to see that a gallery in his museum -  The Grainger Hall of Gems -  can now show their collection to the entire world in this captivating and innovative way.

By Dr Lance Grande & Allison Augustyn, developed by Touch Press (www.touchpress.com) in collaboration with The University of Chicago Press (www.press.uchicago.edu/press) based on the book Gems and Gemstones by Grande & Augustyn, University of Chicago Press 2009. 

© Carole Blake 2011