Review: Cyanide and Happiness

Overview

If you don't know what Cyanide and Happiness is, where have you been? C and H is a sometimes offensive, sometimes cringeworthy, always funny webcomic. And now they have an app that gives you access to all the webcomic goodness that they have to offer. The app gives you access to over 1800 comics, animated shorts and news as well as the ability to save your favorites for offline viewing.

Features

- Access to over 1800 comics - Stream all the C+H animated shorts - Save comics to favourites for offline viewing - Shake for a random comic - Month by month archive viewing - "Seizure Mode" The home page of Cyanide and Happiness gives you access to the latest entry from each category; comic, news and animated short. Click any of these and you will be taken directly to that item. You also have access to the options for the app, which includes cache management for deleting anything you have looked at, a link to the official Cyanide and Happiness website as well as a toggle for "Seizure Mode". Seizure mode is one of the strangest things I have ever seen in an app; turn it on and everything starts to shake. That's it. Very, very odd. The next page you can access through the navigation bar at the bottom is news. This page, as you can probably guess, gives you access to the latest news from the site. The refresh button at the top will update the feed if there is anything new to read. Now onto the actual content. The comics tab is split into 4 sections; favourites, newest, last read and archives. Favourites is any comic you have flagged as a favourite and these can be viewed offline. Last read will take you to the last comic that you were reading. Newest, obviously, takes you to the most recently released comic. When viewing a comic, you can navigate to the previous or next comic, add the comic as a favourite with the thumbs up button and as well as press the question mark button to jump to a random comic. You can also access a random comic by shaking your iDevice. Comics can be viewed in landscape or portrait and you can zoom in and out using the standard pinch gesture. The archive section lets you view every comic every published, by month, right back to 2005 when Cyanide and Happiness was first launched. The final section is the C+H animated shorts. Simply choose the comic you want to view, press play and the video will stream directly from YouTube.

The Breakdown

The Good: C+H makes it really easy to access everything that is on offer and the full archives are a great feature. Everything is split into its own section making it easy to find want you want and being able to jump right back to the last comic you were viewing means you won't have to run through loads of comics just to get back to the one you want. The Bad: Although you can zoom in and out when viewing comics, I do feel like a better interface could be used to view them. Even in landscape mode, it can be a pain having to scroll and zoom constantly just to make sense of the comic. Also, although there is the 'last read' feature, I would prefer if the app saved exactly where you are if you get interrupted, as sometimes the app doesn't seem to remember exactly which comic you were on and jumps you to one that is close.

The Verdict

If you're a fan of Cyanide and Happiness then you should definitely buy this app. If you're not, check it out on the web first then I'm sure you'll be hooked. As for the app itself, for $0.99, you really can't go wrong. It's a great app to just jump into when you have a couple of minutes spare and the shake for random feature make it really easy to find something new.

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