Diappointingly Lame

The Wired iPad app. [Link]

Using a Microsoft-like facility for descriptive yet forgettable product names, its “Digital Viewer technology” creates “a digital magazine format” made up of pictures. Twice I asked publicist Russell Brady how this output differs from exporting a PNG from Acrobat, and twice Brady refused to answer. (He didn’t ignore the question. He just didn’t answer it.)

If you want to “publish” a “magazine” as an “app” consisting solely of flat image files, you can already do that quite handily right now with a copy of Acrobat. It won’t have Wired’s cachet, but as we’ve seen, the magazine of the digital revolution does everything wrong when it tries to visually express itself in digital form. Whatever Wired does online and on the iPad, you should do the opposite. Wired.app proves that even a smart magazine with a crackerjack designer has yet to come to grips with what a “digital magazine” really is.

It looks pretty, but you can't search, select or use accessibility features. Lame.