One Thin Tumbl

It’s worth sharing two well-considered critiques of the new Wired app for iPad, which nicely temper my breathless excitement about the app two days ago. First, Information Architects provides a second-blush dissection of the app, finding print design lost in a new land. Second, an attack from the inside out: Interfacelab breaks open the Wired for iPad source and finds little more than a big pile of images glued together with XML. Where’s the HTML5? Nowhere near Adobe, apparently.

I hope the Wired team sees both these articles, not because I want to see their project fail, but to the contrary, because I still see the Wired app as representing the potential success of the magazine format on a tablet computer. Condé Nast’s first foray is a heartening proof of concept, but the publisher will need to quickly tear the prototype foam from their new model, lest Wired for iPad be left as merely inspiration for any number of nimbler, better-looking followers.

(Thanks to TPUTH for highlighting both of these articles.)

Well, it finally arrived early this morning: the future of magazines. The first issue of Wired for the iPad lives up to the promise of all those demo videos we drooled over. It’s beautifully designed, and doubly so: the app’s UI is elegant and intuitive, so navigating the magazine immediately makes sense. Better, the articles themselves are laid out to be sharp, engaging, and readable. (Oh, right, that’s what magazines have always offered over the mere text-dumps of most magazine and newspaper web sites.) Text is set to be crisp and legible (already more so, somehow, than iBooks), and, probably crucial to the experience, pages don’t scroll — they slide out and in as discrete units. (Considering as well how much more pleasant Instapaper on the iPad is when set to page-at-a-time reading, instead of scrolling, suggests that the ubiquitous scrolling text of the web and desktop world was never very friendly to reading.)

Bits of interactivity — whether it’s touching images in a small feature to change associated text, or swiping a finger left and right, Quicktime VR style, to animate an illustration — are, thank goodness, largely in service to the article, and not just tech candy. There aren’t as many touchable doodads as there may have been, which tells me the editors used good discretion on when to supplement what, in the end, is the real content: the articles themselves.

If you’re a design dork like me you’ll also be flipping between portrait and landscape on nearly every page (uh, yes, even the ads) to see the thoughtful layouts created for each orientation. I haven’t found either to be superior as far as reading, which means a bunch of people did their job well.

Granted, in its first iPad incarnation, Wired already frustrates a little: the download itself is huge, evidently weighed down by baked-in videos — most of which are part of ads (which, happily, don’t play automatically). Surely this heft could be thinned down to something streaming, especially for non-editorial content. Meantime, will the app offer a way to manage which issues I’m storing on my suddenly smaller-seeming 16 GB device? And how much will each issue cost?

Small nicks on the big picture. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this app is that, for all the design and tech whiz-bang involved, within a few minutes I wasn’t so concerned with flipping pages or checking the UI. I was actually reading articles — comfortably, happily, and wanting to read more.

That, my dears, is technology and design truly supporting content.