A review of Wired's iPad app
How useful will the iPad be in revolutionising the traditional publishing industry? We asked Bristol, London, and now New York based app development company, Mubaloo to review the first media apps to be launched on the iPad.
Here is a review of The Wired Magazine's iPad app.
“At 4 stars and 105 ratings it would seem that this app pretty much nailed down the transition from print to digital form. It is also the number one paid app on the iPad app store. However, some reviews about the app have strongly criticised the fact that besides some animations and interactive parts the magazine is basically a series of images, as if they just scanned the pages of the print edition. Problems with this are:
• Layouts such as using two or more columns that work on print do not work on digital form.
• Fonts get lost because you have less resolution on an iPad than on print.
• Interactive elements are sometimes overlooked by the user since it is not easy or intuitive to tell apart ornaments from actual buttons.
• No search functionality
• No copy and paste
• No zoom
Whilst I don't agree with the reviewers saying that the magazine is difficult to read, I do think that although it has good presentation it should do more things and exploit the fact that its digital i.e. copy and paste functionality, zoom, search etc.
• At £2.99 the price is somewhat high but still reasonable.
• The application is a 500 MB download, the downside to this is that the magazine can only be downloaded through wifi, but this has the advantage that reading the magazine requires no connection, all videos, graphics are already there.
• Exclusive content, the videos and other interactive bits which cannot be seen on the website and of course neither the print edition.”
Ivan Sanchez, developer at Mubaloo
Read yesterday's review of The Wall Street Journal's iPad app, by David Dixon, developer at Mubaloo.