Earth Primer
Make the Earth move
$14.99 for Mac, $9.99 for iPad From Chaim Gingold, earthprimer.com Needs OS X 10.6.6 or later For years we’ve enjoyed digital books that take advantage of the latest technologies, peppering pages with interactive elements. Earth Primer, though, feels as far removed from typical digital tomes as CD-ROMs once were from encyclopedias.
This is mostly down to its sense of childfriendly playfulness. Creator Chaim Gingold has a background in games, and it shows. Most pages invite you to interact, such as when creating a volcano by dragging magma towards the Earth’s surface. Elsewhere, you raise sea levels, or freeze everything solid — just to see what happens.
Whatever your age, Earth Primer tends to reveal a desire for gleeful destruction. Sure, you could very gradually make changes to on-screen conditions, carefully noting how a biome adjusts to shifts in temperature. Or you could unleash your inner child, raising and lowering sea levels like a maniac while a chunk of landscape evolves in fast-forward.
When it’s time to get down to serious learning, though, Earth Primer still hits the right notes. It might initially seem light on content — you could blaze through the entire thing in an hour. But you soon realize it has a singular focus. Text is intentionally used sparingly; questions left hanging are meant to be answered by the user.
Only once you arrive at the Biome section — having exhausted Interior, Surface, and Water — does Earth Primer lose a little of its luster. The variety and sense of pace evident in the earlier sections are absent as you methodically trudge through 11 animated biomes, from taiga to subtropical desert.
Luckily, you then reach Sandbox, which gives you a slice of land to play with, using elements you’ve learned about. You can build mountains and carve rivers, bake the ground, add wind, and raise sea levels. You can save and duplicate favorite setups, and click a randomization button to shake things up.
The only snag is that the controls on the Mac don’t feel as fluid as they might. The original iPad version is cheaper, and more pleasing to interact with. Still, if you’re resolutely Mac-only and want to learn more about our planet, you won’t find better on the Mac App Store.
The bottom line. A lively, beautifully realized, remarkably entertaining interactive book about Earth science.