Comments on: The Wired Issue

By: Matthew kay

Matthew kay — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 21:59:08 +0000

There are three major players at the moment offering digital magazine frameworks.

1. Adobe (WIRED)
2. Bonnier (Popular science)
3. WoodWing (TIME)

InDesign is at the core of all these frameworks and only one of them spits out a 500MB issue!

The Hype surrounding the WIRED reader is nonsense. How can the world get so excited about static pages with hyperlinks and .png sequences. The reading experience is poor due to multi-column layouts and although i approve of video covers i don’t expect these features to auto initiate when I switch the orientation of the device.

I applaud Bonnier for investing so much R&D time into the User Experience and I love the flexibility of the WoodWing solution. They are the forerunners in this race and they respect the developers role in delivering feature rich front end readers that can take full advantage of emerging web technologies.

Matthew Kay
Information Architect

http://www.bemarvellous.com

By: iPadwalker

iPadwalker — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:19:38 +0000

I think they (Wired Mag) purposely made the magazine this big.
I am sure they knew of ways to make the App size smaller.
But think of the Buzz that they are getting, its free marketing.
Everyone is talking about the BIG HUGE Wired Mag App.
pages are written about it on various websites.
They will probably come out with a lighter issue a few months from now and say ” NOW only 256MB!”
Then people will start again to Toot Wired Magazine for being able to make the app smaller with the same amount of content……

I think it might be a Marketing plan….

By: Tom_E

Tom_E — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 08:15:10 +0000

I guess most users don’t bother too much about the size until it is perceived as “not worth the associated time and trouble”.

Contributing to the later is:
- an update happens, requiring twice the original size to install
- the update has features some users don’t perceive as improvement
- downloading takes long
- you don’t get a “what’s new” list BEFORE clicking “download new version”

An example is a T-Mobile branded edition of a navigation software in Germany.
It was updated not with fixes and navigation related features but social networking integration.
Based on the comments it seems it became a perceived problem for a vocal group of users to
- re-download around 2GB of data
- make room on the phone to allow upgrading (requiring twice the app size) instead of installing an 2GB app
- on the weekend, based on iTunes comments the download rate was not up to the theoretical limit, making it a multi-hour download

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:08:51 +0000

Like you say, everyone is saying how the Wired app is the future of magazines on the iPad.
Has no one who says that bothered to look at Popular Science? I know it’s not necessarily as mainstream as Wired, but the implementation is thousands of times better from what I’ve been hearing. I havnt bought the Wired app, and to be honest, I’m not going to.
But I will keep buying Popular Science because it is a joy to read, with crisp text and fantastic quality pictures, and fraction of the download size.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:31:19 +0000

Size certainly matters. It mattered when Netscape was 1.0 and every image needed buttering to be efficient. Users could only wait 2 or 3 minutes for a page to load. :-) It matters today. So what if we have high network speeds? This doesn’t mean that one should needlessly fill the pipe.

It’s no wonder that carriers have issues with tethering. If developers seemingly don’t care, and users seemingly don’t care or don’t know how or why a file size is the way it is, I wouldn’t allow tethering on my network either.

If the file is .5gb x 1000, 10000, or 100,000 downloads, that is A LOT of wasted bandwidth. I would argue that the InDesign file prior to output to a PDF might be 500 mb. An iPad simply doesn’t need all the unnecessary bits.

Developers definitely need to add ‘smallest download size’ to the list of project ‘to-do’s’.

By: Nat

Nat — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:16:46 +0000

My worry about a technical push for a more efficient presentation of magazine content is that it would make it harder for the designers at Wired to push unique editorial layouts into each issue. There is a huge visual difference (and value proposition for consumers) between the generic article page layouts of Wired.com and the same articles shown in this format.

500MB is huge, but so is the visual appeal of the app. I think efforts to reduce the issue size should be made, but not at the expense of the visual experience. Outside of flat layout images, I’m not sure how a time and resource constrained publisher could get a unique issue out on a monthly basis.

By: @gunhp

@gunhp — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:13:50 +0000

I think size is really matters for me as a customers. I almost buy this app until i realize that the size is big enough to download.
There also an app with “amasing” size. XE the Element, the app size is 1,7 GB

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:04:04 +0000

half a gig matters a lot – what if others took this approach? i want my expensive storage for music and videos, not a magazine. and back issues aren’t viable like this either.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:01:58 +0000

I don’t understand why they wouldn’t include the largest image only, and then a set of instructions in the XML to generate, as needed the thumbnail/other image formats they needed. Build them on an as-needed basis, but store the results so they don’t have to be rendered another time. This would reduce the workload on the designers, allow for more flexible and different sizes/formats to be generated through instructions in the future, and finally, reduce the download size.

Libraries for resizing and resampling images exist on the iPhone. Use them.

Once that is done, you have an even more flexible and powerful engine with which to show the same type of content (pages of a magazine) in many different ways…ways you haven’t even thought of yet.

By: Michael Niehoff (Kitcat490)

Michael Niehoff (Kitcat490) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:51:33 +0000

As a developer myself (though not very experienced) I can’t even imagine using images for everything! If this is the future, then I am staring a resistance group of developers that actually use code. I admit I still can’t code anything utilizing graphics for the most part, but the solution the wired developers used is a perfect example of how not to make a program. Why do so few developers now not even try for the challenge of efficiency, to use solutions nobody else previously had? It’s not just about making the program, but also about challenging yourself to have better code, to improve your skills.

Michael Niehoff (Kitcat490)