1. Limited Observations on Magazines and the iPad

    Over the past few weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to use an iPad at Realmac HQ. Since its arrival, I’ve tried a few of the magazine applications: TIME, Popular Science and then today WIRED. In short, I love reading them on the device. However, the experience is far from perfect.

    Issues

    At launch, each magazine seems to go down the route of ‘an iPad app per issue’. Both TIME and Popular Science have since moved over to one app with in-app purchasing. I certainly wouldn’t want more than one icon per magazine on the iPad - even with iPhone OS 4.0’s folders feature - yet as Pieter Omvlee points out, in-app purchases don’t get listed on the App Store’s What’s New section - meaning that publishers with in-app purchases and looking to show off a new issue of their magazine miss out on the marketing.

    Filesizes

    Whilst the Wired app may be visual stunning, with plenty of Pixar multimedia in the launch edition to keep me happy, the 527MB filesize is quite spectacular. So spectacular, of course, that it’s well over the 20MB threshold for over-the-air downloading. AppSizeMatters’ dissection of the app reveal that a significant amount of the application’s bulk is through the heavy use of PNGs (there’s seven used per page), with images alone taking roughly 360MB space up. Whilst the use of hi-res PNGs means the pages look stunning, it seems rather wasteful, not to mention turning the application into something entirely unaccessible. Want to use VoiceOver in your app? Tough. Want to quote some text in an email or blog post? Tough. Want to download the latest edition of Wired whilst on-the-go on your rather expensive iPad 3G? Tough.

    Navigation

    Just a small, quick observation: the navigation around certain apps is highly confusing in my limited testing. Whilst magazines have established that you scroll down to continue reading an article, and left / right to switch to the next piece (or advert), beyond that, I’m never sure how to navigate around.

    Another gripe: most magazines have a table of contents, but no matter where you’re reading in the magazine, some will insist on showing the ToC from the top - even when you’re a hundred or so pages in, meaning you have to do a fair amount of scrolling to see what else is in the vicinity of the article you’re currently reading.

    Reading in landscape

    My favourite aspect of the magazine apps so far has been the landscape reading - the swiping between spreads instead of reading a single-column flowing piece feels far more iPhone like than just scrolling a page in Safari (and that’s entirely due to the use of the organic elasticity when swiping between spreads).

    Final thoughts

    Looking at magazines and the iPad right now, it’s clear there’s plenty of room for improvement. Subscriptions, and a dedicated store perhaps, are both things Apple would want to control and provide. But the magazines themselves - and their partner Adobe - still need to look at how they build the magazine editions. 527MB per issue of Wired, whilst offering readers a seemingly large amount of content, seems to say more about the lack of image optimisation in Adobe’s new publishing system than it does the content within.

    Posted on Tuesday June 1st, 2010