You know what the one thing everyone I’ve met agree with me on regarding the iPad? That they would be nice for magazines; a perfect alternative to those piles of back-issues.
I think iBooks is certainly close to good enough for books, but the collective effort for magazines on iPad is remarkably underwhelming. The best ones so far are either gimmicky (Mag+) or heavyweight (Wired) and none are convenient.
Follow me here: Okay, I understand that the allure of magazines may lie in a big fucking photo. But when you’re slinging around text boxes on an interactive canvas, you can also afford to temporarily push them aside and expand the text column to 30 characters wide, fit for, you know, reading.
Or, yes, I understand that you care about your precious content. But do you care enough that I shouldn’t be able to select some text and quote your marvelous articles? Send them to a friend, perhaps? I can’t even highlight something. No, sorry, I should’ve known that that feature could only ever be used to juice the text out of the latest issue and paste it into a text file for upload to some illicit FTP site, or worse yet, some sort of bay. You’re completely right to deny me functionality; anything for Rupert. I suggest you call it “nightmare-driven development”. If you burn and die, it won’t be because of those text files, whether they exist or not, it’ll be because you did this to yourselves, you fuckers.
I stand by my original idea. A sea of articles on a scroll going left to right, along with the selective ability to pull or zoom into content. That would be taking advantage of the medium, it would be familiar (every magazine has columns), it would easily adopt paging, which I’ve begun to take to, and it would be an improvement over what’s there. Why not dynamic permalinks? (”Read this passage.”) Why not marker highlights? Why not searchable notes and personal tags?
A lack of vision, that’s why. Come on, people, let’s leave the crayons behind; let’s stop just porting dead tree fibers (or, worse yet, PDFs). You should have prototyped past this stage ages ago.
You’ve got the vision, other publishers don’t, so get some cash, commision some writers, photographers for content, and create the thing!
By JulesLt · 2010.07.30 12:43
It seems to me that Time and Sports Illustrated, the latter better than the former, are quite closer to what you need: horizontal scrolling. Time allows to scroll horizontally to change article and vertically to remain in the article. Both scrollings are paged so you never lose your track on the page. SI removes vertical scrolling, keeps horizontal paging and two-column pages allow easy reding. No page flipping effect, no zoom, no page floating in the scroll-view-sea as seen in many newspaper-pdf-or-png-readers.
By Carlo · 2010.07.30 14:00
I have to agree. When CD-ROMs came out magazines used them to provide their content. It was stated to be more interactive but the reality was it was just their static magazine. Nothing to really do with the text. The idea died. Magazine Apps? It’s the exact same thing. There is no real functionality just their static magazine.
And I think it has to do with those that design a magazine’s look and feel. They are still 20th century they have no real idea about being 21st century and designing a magazine to be interactive. They lock up their geek web page designers into a back room and let them have little input in to the design and flow of the magazine (if a magazine has any real flow other than left to right). Or worse they do it themselves using Adobe tools and tons of flash to make things jump out at you but doesn’t allow the content to be interactive.
We’re waiting for the true Interactive artist and designer out there. It is the person or persons that can take words, images, data, etc, and make them interactive. We need you to create something that we can pinch, highlight, link to, share, drill down into and get into the data behind the story. Is there a snippet of fact them let us drill into that fact. You do it in a way with boxes with infographics to the left that take us away from the main story. Why take us away? Allow us to see that if I highlight the snippet that there is an infographic explaining the snippet that jumps into existence and allows us to learn what it means and leads us, the reader, back to the main story. A side trip off the main road that just winds back to the main road. Make the stories live for us and then you’ll have an awesome magazine app.
Until then, you can keep your app if I wanted a static magazine page I’ll pick up a copy of Wired (unless it has Will Farrell or some other inane actor on it) at the local magazine stand.
By Jake · 2010.07.30 14:34
Carlo: I’d actually like for both intra-issue and intra-article scrolling to be horizontal. People like reading in columns, and columns are already natural. It doesn’t “just” have to be a sea of that content; I’m rather imagining a draggable tag to “skip to the next article” or some page guide like in Photos or for that matter the Wired app (one of the things that they actually did get right).
JulesLt: I’d rather actually sit down to create the engine. But it worries me that even the people who have visions envision flashier Flash sites rather than something that is more convenient and plays to the strength of the medium.
By Jesper · 2010.07.30 14:39
Jake: Ding! You’ve got it.
By Jesper · 2010.07.30 15:02
I made a multi-column horizontal-scrolling stylesheet for Readability that perhaps provides a rough approximation of what we’re talking about here: http://anoved.net/2010/06/mcreadability/
By Jim · 2010.07.31 00:31
Jim: I like McReadability — really cool!
By Jake · 2010.07.31 03:16
Surely a pirate would rather scan in the whole pages of a physical copy and upload those to some sort of digital bay? As long as there isn’t a function like print screen (And surely it wouldn’t copy the whole page including content off the edge of the window) at 100% quality I think they have nothing to worry about. Selection of text and images should be encouraged. Perhaps even an option like, “Collate and email a summary of this article/page to my friend” could be added?
By Chris · 2010.07.31 08:36
Chris: There is a function like print screen at 100% quality. Home button + Lock button = screenshot. You could go through every page and do this and stick it in a PDF (via an OCR reader or not). They’re already boned in this sense, and this doesn’t even give people the benefit of selection, as you say. So I really don’t see the argument.
Those that are gonna copy entire books or magazines are gonna copy entire books or magazines. They’re going to use your software no matter what but they’re not your customer. Focus on winning over us instead of making life harder for them.
Jim: It’s a good demonstration, but I imagine the columns being more dynamic. Imagine a chart or a photo appearing in one of the columns. You could pinch it to make it take up almost the entire screen and continue to zoom into it, but “in place” in the whole column layout, so you could just as easily also skip over it.
By Jesper · 2010.07.31 09:48