Is Wired's App Really the Future of Magazines? 207
MBCook writes "Interfacelab has put up a review of Wired's new iPad app, and declared, 'The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a [1990s] multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism.' While providing little interactivity other than a fancy page-flip, the application is made of XML and images, including two for the text of each page in portrait and landscape mode. This seems to be why the application is 500MB. The article suggests this was done to get the app out quickly after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs."
Re:again with the flash? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, it does appear to be related: Adobe built this app in Flash for Wired, intending to use the beta CS5's iPhone compilation. Once Apple banned that, they did a fairly hasty port, which appears to still use some sort of auto-compilation from InDesign. [venturebeat.com]
Re:again with the flash? (Score:2, Informative)
Bonus points for your book link. I meant to get that title a while ago and forgot about it. Just downloaded it for my kindle-reader iPad client - thx!
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, more like ten minutes. I got it because people were crowing about how great it was, but it was mostly ads, and some fairly lame interactivity that could have been done better in Javascript on a web page. If this is the future of magazines, they can keep it. Don't waste your money.
Oh, plus, they warn you that they're tracking your viewing. I guess it was nice of them to warn us, but part of the Brave New magazine experience I am *not* looking for is a little mini- Conde Nast- panopticon.
Re:iPad review or Wired App review? (Score:1, Informative)
Interesting. Quite a good merging of the traditional magazine with the modern website.
After reading through the article, I found a mentions that Wired also dropped the ball compared to their initial concept.
For all of the interactivity that was touted in the Flash prototype, what we’ve really ended up with is a glorified slide show.
Combined with the line in the summary
The article suggests this was done to get the app out quick after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs.
I had to check what the original concept was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwFbwHaP5tE Approximately 1:04 in.
All in all, it seems like the two concepts were similar, but Wired had to sacrifice quite a bit to get it in on time. I've gotta say that USA Today might also end up with quite a few flaws once they get it out in the real world. Or..they just redo it in HTML5 and make it less dull. Who knows!
Re:500MB??!! (Score:2, Informative)
Allowing copy/paste is optional, not required. The only way this could possibly be their reasoning is if they have an extremely ill-informed developer, or if they were so paranoid as to worry about someone hacking their app and then enabling copy/paste. (At that point, the hacker would be better off just saving the image and running OCR on their desktop.)
Re:The Thrill Wears Off When the Math Kicks In (Score:3, Informative)
I get dead-tree Wired for $10 a year; less than a buck an issue. So for the price of more than 5 such issues, I should buy a single issue with a glorified shovel-ware interface?
Hmmm, let me think about that for a second. OK, no.
Yes, I agree with this. I get it cheap, too. I've been collecting it for years.
Bad enough Wired never grew up out of its hipster typeface fetish, rendering many of the paper pages barely legible; I shudder to imagine what it looks like on an iPad.
Completely not true. They gave up the illegible chaotic design many years ago. The main article text is all the same typeface black on white, laid out as normal (parallel to the bottom of the page). The diagonally set text on paisley backgrounds, or whatever, was fun for a bit, but stopped a long LONG time ago.