Is Wired's App Really the Future of Magazines?

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 27, 2010 @11:51AM from the at-least-bandwidth-is-free dept.

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."

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Re:Well... by mellon · 2010-05-27 12:41 · 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.