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500MB download? Why didn't Wired Magazine use HTML5 for their iPad app?
- ars 16y agoDid I miss something? Did adobe buy wired? He keeps talking about adobe here, but I don't see the connection.
- radley 16y agoAdobe built the app for Wired. First it was Flash/AIR based, but then they have to make it iPOS compliant...
- blhack 16y agoI'm not really sure if you're trying to say: iPhone/iPad Operating system or iPiece Of Shit. What the heck with the downvotes? Aren't the iPhone and iPad Operating Systems based on one another? I just thought it was funny that, at first glance, my brain saw something completely different than "iPhone Operating System".
- radley 16y agoOf course I'm playing with the double meaning. It's a semantic irony to insist iPad and iPod apps are built in "iPhone OS" and never "iPOS".
- tdonia 16y agoAdobe built the app for Wired: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-...
- dreyfiz 16y agoThe iPad edition of the magazine was originally made in a beta version of Flash CS5, relying on its ability to output iPhone OS apps. When Apple banned third-party runtimes, Adobe built Wired this horrifying hack. I think it's an InDesign plugin. The idea is that Wired's designers won't have to learn anything about the iPhone OS to create the app, but this is a pretty atrocious implementation.
- statictype 16y agoWhy do you say the implementation is atrocious?
- dreyfiz 16y agoNo inside knowledge or anything like that, just from the description in the article above of what they're doing internally. Converting each page of the layout into two JPEGs, one for portrait and one for landscape. That's really wasteful and destructive, they're ruining the usability of text and turning their paid app into an inferior product compared to their website.
- andreyf 16y agoBecause whatever software they use to layout the magazine can't export to HTML5. Since they're optimizing for time-to-market, they don't have time to retrain their designers to use different software, rewrite/extend it, or wait for the creators of that software to add export-to-HTML5 functionality, and so this was the most reasonable move. Give it some time, and they'll either move everything to HTML5 or a similar format with the features they need (their style of pagination, control over scrolling/swiping details in the UI, etc).
- carterschonwald 16y agohrm, presumably whatever layout tool they use can export to pdf, and presumably it would be possible to then use Scribd's html5 tech (or license the right to use it) to then make it html 5?
- xenophanes 16y agoGood idea, but maybe they started this project before that was announced, or they aren't bleeding edge enough to come up with that kind of solution.
- raganwald 16y ago> Since they're optimizing for time-to-market How have they optimized for time to market given that they have a large team of HTML-savvy web designers in house? And what is the point of optimizing for time if you fail to deliver something that delights your market? I haven't tried this thing, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but if every page is an image, how does one copy text? If there is text in a column, Double tapping ought to maximize the text to fit the column. I don't imagine that works either. So they're making something that looks like a web page but offers less functionality. That's a very poor trade-off. Those 90s CD-ROMs made money for people back when browsers couldn't deliver that experience. They offered more functionality than the web. Today, stuff like this offers less functionality. That's a big sacrifice to make.
- adulau 16y agoIf we purchase that, can we export it and read it in reader using an open and free format? I suppose again, we can't use it and are forced to go in p2p to fetch a converted and open version. I'm always willing to buy e-books in open format and they always end-up in broken or/and proprietary formats that you can't read on your platform. This always reminds me of the DRM sucks visualization for the audio book : http://s3.amazonaws.com/the_brads/the_brads_drm.png http://s3.amazonaws.com/the_brads/the_brads_drm.png
- GR8K 16y agoHe should have mentioned Sports Illustrated at I/O 2010 for their magazine demo built in HTML5 to make his point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j7mM_JBNw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j7mM_JBNw
- ajg1977 16y agoA better article would be "Why Wired Didn't use HTML5 for their iPad App". Since that probably wouldn't have the same link-bait worthy title, I'll write one here. Why didn't Wired use HTML5? 1) a) it was built by Adobe who build it on Flash to begin with, b) the tools just aren't there yet. c) because of #2. 2) Why is the app 500MB? Because all the rich content (images, movies, audio) are bundled into the app so you do not need an internet connection to view it. I think we can all agree that downloading a "magazine" before you leave the house, then finding you can't view most of it, would be an uber fail. If the app had been based on HTML5 it would have been a 'mare to cache all of the content locally for offline viewing. HTML5 does offer local storage, but not in a way that would allow sites to cache 500MB of content. And even if they could, do you really want to wait 20 minutes for that Pixar feature to download over 3G? I suppose you could have created a native app with everything bundled locally and a UIWebView for rendering the HTML5 content, but really what do you gain from that?
- malnourish 16y agoLess than 500MB? A serious question.
- dirkstoop 16y agoThere's absolutely no reason for it to turn out smaller. The meat of the app is in the media. I make cocoa apps, and I'm pretty sure that the 'native' part of the app — the part of it that could be ditched by linking to WebKit instead – weighs in way under 10 megs
- andybak 16y agoI got the impression that even the text was stored as a graphic.
- voidfiles 16y agoMore testing needs to be done on the Application Cache(http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/#offline http://www.w3.org/TR/offline-webapps/#offline), but you know it might just be possible to cache video content, and if not now it might be possible in the future.
- frou_dh 16y agoBloatware charts new frontiers in 2010!
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoWe can watch 1080p video via YouTube, there is zero reason you can justify keeping it a non html5 app wih large downloads. Making an HTML5 magazine/blog/ipadzine is like a candy store to me.
- petercooper 16y agoClause 3.3.1 states: Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine This means that any "interactive" elements must either be written directly in Objective C, or you're confined entirely to WebKit. If you don't fancy building new Objective C apps every time you roll out an issue of your magazine, you have two options.. do it entirely in WebKit or pre-render everything and spew it out with a simpler native reader. Looks like Wired took the latter option. I'd always wondered how magazines would get around this issue - guess we've found out.
- alex_c 16y agoI don't really understand your point, can you elaborate? That's all that's being discussed here - native app vs. HTML5 (or some hybrid, which is perfectly valid under 3.3.1).
- petercooper 16y agoIn an ideal world, your magazine app wouldn't be solely using Webkit, because you might want to create elaborate and performant interactive elements. However, creating these "by hand" in Objective C for each issue would be time intensive. Instead, you'd usually use a scripting language or a framework like Flash to create interactive elements that are beyond JavaScript's reach. 3.3.1 invalidates this approach requiring you either go Webkit, totally native, or, well, nowhere. There is no middle ground for scripting within apps beyond JavaScript on Webkit.
- betageek 16y agoThe fundamental argument is flawed - I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone could create the same seamless experience as the iPad Wired app in HTML5. I certainly haven't seen any demo's that would imply it's possible, saying "you could do that in HTML 5" if very easy to say, a lot harder to do. Maybe if the authors of these kinds of posts provided us with a demos I'd start taking these missives seriously.
- jawngee 16y agoI'm the author of the article. Have you used it? It really is pretty much a slideshow. Even if you write it using webkit, you can ape whatever wonderful interactions you seem to be having (that I must have completely missed) using multiple UIWebView's and some good ol CoreAnimation. You can also extend UIWebView with straight up Objective-C, further adding in the ability to do pretty much whatever you want. There are a shit ton of HTML 5 demo's on the web. Try google.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- betageek 16y agoI've seen a "shit ton" of demos and nothing I've seen is applicable to this problem. Wired is one of the most visually rich magazines around, it's layouts are complex, the visuals are rich, it's won many design awards - hundreds of people are involved in creating a beautiful design artefact. Writing an article that goes "wired sux, they didn't do it in HTML5" implies that the level of finish of the Wired app is possible, but I haven't seen any demos that are anywhere near the size and complexity of a magazine like Wired - if they exist I'd love to see them
- cpr 16y agoSee the comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385172 (Sports Illustrated showing an all-HTML5 demo that looks a lot more compelling that this Wired app).
- fab13n 16y ago"Why Wired Didn't use HTML5 for their iPad App?" Because consumers are not trained to pay for web sites, whereas they're trained to pay AppStore-delivered apps, that's why. 80% of iPhone/iPad applications, both accepted and rejected ones, would work great in HTML5; the figure is of course much higher for applications that might have been written in flash. But discussions about Apple's languages, SDK or even hardware platforms are moot; the game changer for companies is the AppStore, and access to this AppStore is the only thing they truly care about. They can, but don't want to, distribute most of their stuff over plain old HTTP. What they can't is getting paid for doing so.
- wmf 16y agoAs explained elsewhere in this very thread, you can create App Store apps in HTML; there are already a ton of them in the store. Therefore the HTML vs. ObjC issue is orthogonal to the paid app vs. free Web site issue.
- szensius 16y agoGot a 403 Forbidden error when going to the article.
- jawngee 16y agoYeah I'm in the process of moving the thing off livingdot and onto slicehost. I had no idea it would hit like this. 100K hits since 3pm EST.
- GR8K 16y agoThe company that did the Time Magazine app for iPad: http://www.woodwing.com/en http://www.woodwing.com/en inDesign extension/tool that will do iPad/AIR/HTML5 packaging: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1IZ-16FVs4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1IZ-16FVs4 I think they also did the Sports Illustrated HTML5 magazine with thewondefactory.com
- GR8K 16y agoWired iPad App Sells 24,000 Copies in First 24 Hours http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/wired-ipad-app-sells-24000-copies-in-first-24-hours/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/wired-ipad-app-sells-...
- elblanco 16y agoThanks Steve, this is definitely a better user experience than using flash.
- neovive 16y agoWatching all of the iPad demos, it appears very likely that publishers see this "new" format as an opportunity to monetize content that the web (HTML) has been marginalizing. At the moment, most users just want to read good articles and content, which is freely available on the web. Publishers, Wired in this example and many more likely to follow, are looking for a way to differentiate their content by building an engaging experience around it. No one really knows for sure how this work out in the long run, but I do agree with the author in that it is very reminiscent of the CD-ROM era.
- jimmyjazz14 16y agoI get Wired magazine delivered to me by mail. The user experience is great, the pages turns just like real paper. The thing is indestructible too; I can drop it down a flight of steps without even a scratch showing up on it. My dog chewed up my first copy and it only cost me a few bucks to replace it. I can roll it up stick it in my pocket and read it at the beach, I don't even worry about getting sand in it. Can HTML5 deliver that experience?
- kevinelliott 16y agoI specifically did not purchase the Wired app because: 1) It's freakin' 500MB! Even though I have a 32GB iPad, I want that space for music and videos, not a magazine that I'll probably read once or twice for each issue. 2) It was super unclear how much future issues would cost, how they would be delivered, and how much space subsequent issues would use. I've been very unimpressed with what the media has been able to create with the iPad. I think Apple needs to host a traveling "Developer Days" focused purely on the media, helping them to create really killer shit. After all, these failures only lend ammo to the anti-iPad Kindle worshippers, when the problem is really the ability for media to innovate.
- zandorg 16y agoWired jumped the shark when Louis Rossetto sold out to Conde Nast and left the business.