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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."
Wired made something like $115,000 in four hours of sales.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
re:"The article suggests this was done to get the app out quick after Flash was officially vetoed by Steve Jobs"
Why quick? Wasn't all the years flash was excluded for the iPhone at all a hint? OOOOOh I get it - controversy = hitcounts! Linkbait me baby - linkbait me!
I think the interface still needs a little work - but at least it wasn't nearly as painful as PopSci's efforts. NYT still rules the interface roost. I know where to go - it stays out of the way - and no tutorial on "how to read this magazine" (Time, I'm looking at you).
Might also be nice to have the video play in the page as an option like the NYT too. Or stream it to save on space. I can live without video when I'm on a plane.
Haven't they heard of PDF? I mean, it's not as if the iPad doesn't have PDF written into its DNA from top to bottom, and that the format was pretty much invented for the very purpose to which they are not putting it here.
Jobs may have declared war on Adobe's Flash format but Adobe's PDF format is a whole other story.
Insane!
Each full page is a giant image...
Ah ok... Don't want any copying and pasting...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Indeed. The only real innovation in term of e-readers since the first handheld ones (ala Palm Pilot or similar) has been e-ink, and with color ones coming out soonish, this is seriously the way to go. You don't read several hundred pages in one sitting on an Ipad or similar devices, its just painful. And a book shouldn't need to be recharged every couple of days. E-ink readers and their month-long battery life (if you have a kindle, remember to turn off wifi =P) is the way to go.
Really? This meme again? Someone always brings this garbage up. I guarantee you using the iPad as an eReader will have zero effect on your eyes. People have spent their whole working lives reading worse-quality desktop screens with no eyesight issues. So, you hate the iPad, good for you -- but let's knock the eyesight myth shall on the head shall we? Millions of people will be using the iPad as an eReader with no ill-effects.
But yeah, the answer is no -- purely because this is an extremely inefficient way of delivering content.
Is this a review of the iPad as a magazine-reader ("Is This Really the Future of Magazines"), or a review of the Wired magazine App on the iPad? Judging from the title, it sounds like the former. I'd recommend looking at some other magazines or newspapers on the iPad if you're going to judge it as an eReader. For example, here's the USA Today App for the iPad (jump to 0:50) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5nJVtLygOM
I had to cancel my subscription to WiReD because they have never, ever learned anything about readability and my eyesight has gotten to the point where I need a very bright light and a magnifying glass to read WiReD. I have no problem with books (paperback or hardcover) or most other magazines or newspapers, because for all of them, content is more important than style -- something that has NEVER been true at WiReD.
I mention this because it is a perfect case for providing the magazine content in a format who's style the user may customize -- if they can understand that some people are actually trying to read their stuff and not just saying, "Wow! That's looks really cool. I wonder what it says?" It sounds like they did everything they could to avoid giving the user the ability to manipulate the presentation of their content, which seems to be almost the exact opposite of XML's purpose. I seriously hope that WiReD (and similar content providers) can get back to providing interesting/meaningful/useful content and restraining their style tinkering to the margins, where it belongs.
I hope that the iPad version of the magazine at least allowed the reader to zoom and pan around the page, but knowing WiReD, they probably even disabled that because their strange sense of style demands that we suffer, um, I mean, view the entire page as a whole only.
Hey! Wired is the magazine that I can trust to print long, insightful articles about how the print media is dead!
I have one, and reading on it does in fact give me a headache.
If one could control the font and turn off antialiasing, perhaps it would be better.
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.
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.
Is the iPad (and similar devices) the future of magazines? Short Answer: No
Long Answer: Just do the numbers. Time Magazine has a circulation of 3.3million. Which is 1% of the US population roughly. Now if the same ratio holds true that Time would get a 1% market share of ipad users, that would make for currently... 10,000+/- ipad subscriptions. Even if the ratio is skewed totally out of proportion... Its simply not interesting from a business perspective to shift your content strategy to targeting ipads anytime soon. It will take a lot more than a few million ipads and ipad type devices sold for magazines to shift focus.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
Doesn't the iphone have a web browser?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
That is the proprietary magazine app that Apple was bundling with Macs for some years. It has the same animated page turning and a few other little touches. I think the sample issue that came with it was MacWorld.
by competitor you mean paper?
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
people wont pay for HTML. They think that HTML should be free. People will pay for an "app" because OHHHH its an APP Ohhhhhh!
people wont pay for HTML. They can already get the HTML for free. the Mactards will however, pay for an app because "ohhhh its an app ohhhh!"
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 :)
It was always pretty rare for a magazine to be worth reading from cover to cover. Arguably, editors try to avoid that, since a magazine all of whose contents are interesting to its readers is going to have a very small and specialized subscriber base. Instead, editors try to appeal to a wider group, with the end result being that any given reader is only going to care about a fraction of the content. And this model worked pretty well as long as publication was capital-intensive. The web pretty much put an end to that.
Obviously, it depends on what you're interested in, but nowadays you can find some or all of the kind of content that interests you for free, so unless you're after something highly specialized, you don't have to purchase access at all, much less buy a bunch of content that you aren't interested in to get to the small fraction that does interest you. The old magazine model no longer has much relevance. If so many people hadn't been exposed to magazines before the rise of the web, it would probably never occur to anyone to create online "magazines".
In the long run, someone is going to figure out how to aggregate related content, probably with a high degree of personalization, in such a way that both the aggregator and the content creator get to expose readers to ads and thereby make money. This is basically already Google's approach, and they're making money hand over fist, but they're the ultimate generalists. The more specialized territory is still up for grabs, though it appears likely that specialized aggregators are more likely to evolve from blogs and wikis than search engines.
But the magazine? It existed only because of a resource scarcity that no longer exists. Trying to make the magazine work in the age of the Internet is like trying to keep a ferry business alive after the bridge has been built.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Agreed.
You won't be sitting in a dentist's waiting room where they have provided a pile of iPads to browse while you wait.
Physical editions will be around for some time yet.
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.
Your numbers assume that every person is the same as any other from an advertiser's point of view and that simply isn't true. This is just a guess, but I bet the iPad owning demographic is very desirable for advertisers. These are people who have disposable income and they aren't afraid to dispose of it.
Those 10,000 iPad readers may be worth much, much more than the same number of print readers.
What really matters in this game is where advertisers are willing to buy ads.
Mama always told me "Don't sit so close to the TV. It'll ruin your eyes." Since the 1980's I've sat in front of a computer monitor for hours on end (I even have my 'monitor glasses' fixed at 1.5 to 2.5 feet). ;)
experience while using Cocoa and Objective-C, don't blame Apple. Blame the limited talents of Adobe and Wired who developed the application.
Yes, there is usually a link between intellectual activities which force you to focus your sight to close objects (it used to be mainly reading, but now it is also using a computer), and nearsightedness. Of course, correlation is not causation, etc.
It is also known that the kind of corrective lenses used will affect the evolution of nearsightedness. You don't get the same results using glasses, contacts, overcorrection or undercorrection.
What idiots. They're shipping an "application" that consists of over 4,000 image files and some XML. You have to download 500MB of stuff to read the magazine. How long is that going to take?
Then there's the content problem. Wired, at this point, is basically a product catalog. Yet they didn't put a shopping cart system in the online version. That's just dumb. The demographic that buys both iPads and Wired would definitely click on "buy now" buttons.