WIRED for iPad … I won’t be buying issue #2
Okay, so I bought the WIRED edition for iPad, because it just looked too cool, and the page navigation seemed much more intuitive than that of Popular Science (which I still can’t figure out). I loved it for the first hour or so. Now I’m over it … this clearly is not the future of digital magazines. Here’s just one little aspect of what’s wrong:
Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
With the Wired app weighing in at a whopping 500 megabytes – just 100 shy of a full CD-ROM – how do they intend to maintain new editions of the magazine? 500 MB is too large for a 3G download (no help from AT&T’s less than spectacular network performance) and for those with iPad’s with the smaller storage, each issue will take a significant chunk of space on the device. […]
Why is the magazine so large? Being the intrepid hacker that I am (*wink*) I mounted my jail broken iPad via AppleTalk and quickly tore into the app itself to see how it was constructed. Similar to the PopSci+ magazine application, each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by “a bunch of images” I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB.
Each full page is a giant image – there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode. Yes, I’m laughing on the inside too. There is no text or HTML, just one gigantic image. The “interactive” pieces where you can slide your finger to animate it are just a series of JPG files. When you press play on the audio file and see the progress meter animate? A series of PNG files.
Something is wrong with this picture. Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate.
Consumers are definitely missing out when the digital version is simply a recreation of the print version. And, yes, 500MB equals 1/32 of my total iPad storage, an amount that I find completely unacceptable for a single object. Most of which constitutes ads, I should point out, that I paid for.
The guys over at iA do a great job discussing the layout of thing, an essay that transcends WIRED and applies to all content on the iPad:
Most of the problems that I pointed out (column width, font choices, ornaments, the paper metaphor) and many more (unable to copy paste or zoom) seem to be a result of using InDesign, a layout program optimized for paper designs.
Yeah, as I pointed out before, I think there is room for a lot more to be done on this platform.
