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Is Wired's App Really the Future of Magazines?
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."
the eyesight myth
That is not a complete myth, you do indeed develop shortsightedness from reading from an iPad or anything else held at an arms length. Though develop means you still have to be growing, i.e. a kid. So sending them outside to play instead of sitting in front of a screen does have its merits.
The study I remember was comparing kids in Israel. Some grew up in highly religious communities where they spend a lot of time reading the Torah, the other half grew up in more secular communities. The result was that those who read more were more likely to become short sighted. There is truth to the bespectacled intellectual stereotype.
IIRC the proposed mechanism is that the signal quality which the neurons receive influence the elongation of the eye, and focusing on near objects somehow makes them grow longer. Terrible control mechanism for the correct eye size, typical evolutionary hackjob :)
Get the past issues and a cheap micrometer. :)
Graph the health of the US tech sector based on the thickness and ads packed into years of Wired.
The 2010 issues are thin
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
integrated instapaper (seriously - try instapaper for the ipad - it's scary cool when used with "print this page") functionality would be cool as shit. I'd pay through a paywall if the content was better than the web version - and wired.com is mostly a macroblog site - not their magazine content.
They could create a paywall site for their paper content - and a little more - and create an instapaper-type version for offline local. They'd get both ipad and non-ipad readers all in one go.
So, I'm a long time prepress guy converted into a web designer and ultimately an online application developer. I make my living at a printing company that makes money putting ink on paper, and am always caught up in discussions and planning sessions where we prognosticate about what new electronic development is going to put a dent in the magazine business.
Lots -- and I mean lots -- of industry experts have been predicting that the Apple tablet would be the beginning of the end of print. Of course, this has been predicted many times before: CD-ROMs were going to do it, then the web, then web-based digital editions, and now the iPad. But this time, the talk was at a fever pitch. Bosacks alerts were coming out months before the mainstream media picked up on the initial iPad hype. Lots of people thought this would be the one.
And, it's not really, is it? And I didn't really think it would be either. When I try to imagine the electronic invention that replaces the utility of ink on paper (especially for magazines or other non-time-sensitive publishing), I can't really come up with an idea of what that might be. The online digital editions and iPad apps are cute -- even cool -- but they wouldn't stop me from throwing 128 pages of bound paper into a briefcase on a travel day. Besides, portable electronics are expensive and precarious. They need cases and screen protectors. They don't roll up. They aren't disposable if you spill your coffee on them.
So, what's it going to be? What will the technology look like that actually makes publishers stop printing on paper altogether? I really don't know.