7 ms·

The Magazine: For geeks like us. By Marco Arment

84 points by bloodberet 14y ago

n0nick 14y ago
Looks interesting. Finally, a use for the dreaded un-removable "Newsstand" icon on my iPhone.
janfoeh 14y ago
Too bad it is iOS6 only, leaving my iPad 1 out in the cold.
- noirman 14y ago
  Wait, iPad 1 supports iOS6 no?
  - mikeevans 14y ago
    Nope.
  - creativityhurts 14y ago
    No, it doesn't. Marco has been talking a lot on his podcast about dropping support for the iPad 1 for Instapaper as well in order to use some of the new iOS6 features.
    - kitsched 14y ago
      Wow, I didn't know he was planning to drop support for the 1st gen iPad. Bad news. :(
    - macieka 14y ago
      I think he said it would have made it easier if he could use the iOS 6 features, but he wasn't planning on dropping support for iPad 1 yet/
      - creativityhurts 14y ago
        From what I recall he said he'll drop the support for iPad 1 with the next big Instapaper release.
  - s_henry_paulson 14y ago
    No, but I can't for the life of me figure out what technical reason is preventing Apple from allowing this. If an iPhone 3GS can run iOS6, I am perplexed why the same can't be true for the iPad 1.
    - weiran 14y ago
      I imagine they don't see it worth the effort to squeeze iOS 6 into the iPad's 256MB RAM. (I know the 3GS also has 256MB of RAM but it's display resolution is much lower).
    - buzzkillr2 14y ago
      The ipad1 has a larger screen which strains the gpu more than the 3gs does. (that is the paraphrased reasoning iirc)
    - reaganing 14y ago
      They were still selling the 3GS until just a few weeks ago; it would have annoyed many customers if iOS 6 wasn't released for the device. The first-gen iPad, on the other hand, stopped being sold when the iPad 2 was released in March 2011. iOS 5 also doesn't run all that great on the iPad, so I'm sure that played into the decision not to offer iOS 6 as well. The 256MB of RAM paired with the large screen seems to be the biggest cause for this. The 3GS' hardware isn't great, but it's only powering a 320*480 display
    - mikeash 14y ago
      The 3GS effectively has better hardware than the iPad 1. CPU, RAM, etc. are basically the same, but the iPad has to drive about five times as many pixels. Thus it effectively has much less RAM, an underpowered CPU/GPU, etc. It's an odd and unintuitive situation, but despite being newer than the 3GS, the original iPad is ultimately a less powerful device, when it comes to which apps and OS releases it can support. I'm sure Apple could support iOS 6 if they wanted to, but I imagine they decided that it wasn't worth the tradeoffs (e.g. poor performance, RAM available to apps, resulting stability or lack thereof).
- ynniv 14y ago
  Yes, this is a misstep for an app of this nature. Instapaper needs to support the iPad 1 for another cycle.
navs 14y ago
I'd love to see this as a webapp. I'm one of those folks that just doesn't use apps or even sign in to my apple account. I'm sure more of my kind exist. EDIT: Whoops I see this has paid in-app purchases. I wonder if there's something out there that can offer as seamless an experience as iTunes in-app purchases for webapps.
- jasonlbaptiste 14y ago
  Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.
- jasonlbaptiste 14y ago
  Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Stripe for payment, Persona for auth.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty depressing when the only reason a magazine is iOS only is because it uses Apple payments. I guess that was Apple's end goal, but it's just a sad state of affairs. And even if they wanted to use some other option... Apple would block it on iOS.
- tjohns 14y ago
  Have you looked at the digital goods API for Google Wallet? Docs: https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/ https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/ Demos: https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/samples https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/samples
k-mcgrady 14y ago
Interesting. First of all it's very nicely designed and after reading the introduction I like the philosophy behind it. Taking the Instapaper approach of focussing on text is interesting. While images and graphics can often enhance content having nice, plain text on a device the size of the iPhone makes much more sense. So first impressions of it are good. Hopefully the content is just as good. Update: After reading a couple of the articles it seems pretty high quality and justifies the price. It's also only the second good Newsstand app I've used (The New York Times is the other). I've tried several others and they are just 100's of space consuming images, difficult to read especially on the iPhone.
- andycroll 14y ago
  The Guardian UK have a lovely iPad app, but the iPhone app isn't nearly as good.
- guiambros 14y ago
  Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' that permeates the magazine industry. Each issue of Wired is now 500+ MB (due to the Retina displays). If you're on 3G or at a public WiFi, it probably takes more time to download than to read the 2-3 articles you're interested. In hindsight, you wouldn't expect anything different from Marco. Really hope he succeeds.
  - S4M 14y ago
    > Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' that permeates the magazine industry. HN is also like that.
moron 14y ago
I'm more of a fan of Marco-the-Instapaper-developer than Marco-the-fledgling-pundit, but I really want to read that Alex Payne article. Hmmm.
squarecat 14y ago
Another victim is seduced by a leading "The", causing any attempt to reference this publication to become a tragedy of grammar.
- jeffehobbs 14y ago
  Look, man. Unique naming is hard in the Age of Google. And it could be worse, it could be "the.magazi.ne".
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Unique naming is easy. For example, he could have called it "D12792B3-4D86-4E84-8B3C-13DBA7593282". Coming up with unique names that are also useful and good is perhaps somewhat harder.
- shortformblog 14y ago
  The Strokes, The Walkmen and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs would like to have a word with you.
  - regomodo 14y ago
    The Beatles?
  - 89a 14y ago
    They're not called "The Band" though are they
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      No, but "The Band" was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band
  - re_todd 14y ago
    And especially "The The".
smackfu 14y ago
It seems like I am the target audience for this. I listen to his podcast, follow his blog, and read tons of other Apple & tech blogs. And use Instapaper. But I really have no desire to pay a monthly fee for more articles. So I guess I'm opting out of this one.
Osmium 14y ago
It doesn't surprise me that it takes an AAA iOS developer to finally make a good iOS magazine. It always struck me that Newsstand was a wasted potential: full of good publications trying to squeeze their paper format into an app instead of releasing the same content in a better format. Does anybody know of "good" Newsstand apps? This might be the first. I personally think Apple should release a more aggressive Newsstand API and a best practices guide: e.g. by all means customise your design and experience but that doesn't mean you should release an app crammed full of pngs that weighs half a gig. Newsstand apps should be low bandwidth and text-centric. Why can't I search all my magazines from a central location? Why can't I see a central list of articles I've favourited from a variety of publications? As it stands, the only way to do this is with an RSS reader or Instapaper. I'd be happy to pay for quality journalism if it was in a format that's convenient and sensible.
- tstegart 14y ago
  Not all of us magazine makers are coders. For a lot of us, its all about the words, not the format. My little iPad-only travel magazine isn't even in Newsstand because I have no idea how to code it, but our articles have won awards. The technology is not as important as the content. I wish I could do all those things you mentioned, but the fact is I have no idea how. A big magazine might be able to do them, but it requires a total revamp of business practices and a restructuring of workflow. And that's hard when a magazine is staffed by people who will lose their jobs when digital magazines take off.
  - Osmium 14y ago
    And that's precisely why Apple should be releasing an API to help you :) to reduce the burden of coding something yourself. That's one of the big problems right now. A lot of magazines are using Adobe InDesign to publish their iOS magazine apps, because that's all they know how to use but it's not helping anyone because, instead of making something new, Adobe bolted-on iOS publishing to a tool designed to make paper products. Someone else needs to step in and provide an appropriate tool that publishers (big or small) can use. I think it's fair to say we all want to see a way good journalism can exist in a digital world. There's no reason these people need lose their jobs if we can crack this problem. As an aside, care to share a link to your travel magazine? I'd be interested in checking it out. I'm travelling to Japan for the first time tomorrow.
ZanderEarth32 14y ago
I'd really like to give this a shot but am only interested in trying it on my iPad which can't get iOS6, so unfortunately, rather than passing on this, I am being left behind.
- k-mcgrady 14y ago
  It's worth trying on your iPhone (if you have one). It uses the text-only approach of Instapaper so screen-size doesn't affect usability the way it does in standard magazine apps.
- owenfi 14y ago
  It's worth sending that feedback to Marco. He has said in Build and Analyze that the iOS 5 version is written (just disabled currently) and he is curious whether he should release support for it in a version rev or if he can abandon it.
lutusp 14y ago
> "The Magazine: For geeks like us" ... geeks "like us" who only care about iOS and are willing to pay for content. Just to be accurate. Not that there's anything wrong with paying for content. Every time you're confronted by an ad that you didn't volunteer to look at, you're paying for content. But iOS-only seems like quite a limitation, and seems to contradict "for geeks like us" as the headline appears in HN.
- mjb 14y ago
  I don't have a problem paying for content, but I do have a problem with IOS-only. Even though I own an iPad, I like to have access to my reading material in multiple places. I spend a bunch more time looking at my Kindle, for example, and prefer the reading experience there to the iPad. A decade ago, something like this published in the closed formats of the time (MS Word, maybe) would have met with a huge backlash. Today, it seems like Apple have convinced the market that 'closed' is OK, because it's well-designed and a little bit shiny. I think it's a real step backward, especially given the great open standards that are available (like HTML5) and other tools which give similar control with more accessibility (like PDF).
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > Today, it seems like Apple have convinced the market that 'closed' is OK ... Yes, to the degree that Microsoft has decided to imitate the Apple model. It seems Microsoft has closed Windows 8 to third-part applications (except pre-existing ones operating in compatibility mode). All Windows 8 apps that depend on Windows 8 features can only be gotten from Microsoft directly, in an obvious imitation of the App store: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/developers-windows-8/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/developers-windows-8/ What's worse, these cyber-birdcages seem wildly popular.
  - guiambros 14y ago
    I also share the concern with an iOS-only model, but give him a break: it's just a 2 months proof-of-concept. He needs critical mass in order to make this sustainable in the long term - without having to resort to ads, sponsored reviews and all sorts of ways to keep the quality. The choice for iOS for the initial platform seems obvious: it's much easier to monetize quickly. And it's easy to add Kindle, Android, HTML5 and others later on - at the cost of maintaining multiple versions, provided that there's enough interested paying subscribers to justify the effort. I think that's exactly the right approach, and a real step forward.
89a 14y ago
Newsstand? ugh!
mirtes 14y ago
All the articles are available on-line at http://the-magazine.org/1 http://the-magazine.org/1 which is useful for sharing and reading on other devices. I wonder how much evil it would be to create an RSS feed for it.
- ThomasQue 14y ago
  Those are excerpts :/
revelation 14y ago
This mostly seems to be a magazine for Apple afficionados. And thats a terrible thing, because there is nothing geeky about that company or even company worship.

84 points by bloodberet 14y ago

n0nick 14y ago

Looks interesting. Finally, a use for the dreaded un-removable "Newsstand" icon on my iPhone.

janfoeh 14y ago

Too bad it is iOS6 only, leaving my iPad 1 out in the cold.

noirman 14y ago
Wait, iPad 1 supports iOS6 no?
- mikeevans 14y ago
  Nope.
- creativityhurts 14y ago
  No, it doesn't. Marco has been talking a lot on his podcast about dropping support for the iPad 1 for Instapaper as well in order to use some of the new iOS6 features.
  - kitsched 14y ago
    Wow, I didn't know he was planning to drop support for the 1st gen iPad. Bad news. :(
  - macieka 14y ago
    I think he said it would have made it easier if he could use the iOS 6 features, but he wasn't planning on dropping support for iPad 1 yet/
    - creativityhurts 14y ago
      From what I recall he said he'll drop the support for iPad 1 with the next big Instapaper release.
- s_henry_paulson 14y ago
  No, but I can't for the life of me figure out what technical reason is preventing Apple from allowing this. If an iPhone 3GS can run iOS6, I am perplexed why the same can't be true for the iPad 1.
  - weiran 14y ago
    I imagine they don't see it worth the effort to squeeze iOS 6 into the iPad's 256MB RAM. (I know the 3GS also has 256MB of RAM but it's display resolution is much lower).
  - buzzkillr2 14y ago
    The ipad1 has a larger screen which strains the gpu more than the 3gs does. (that is the paraphrased reasoning iirc)
  - reaganing 14y ago
    They were still selling the 3GS until just a few weeks ago; it would have annoyed many customers if iOS 6 wasn't released for the device. The first-gen iPad, on the other hand, stopped being sold when the iPad 2 was released in March 2011. iOS 5 also doesn't run all that great on the iPad, so I'm sure that played into the decision not to offer iOS 6 as well. The 256MB of RAM paired with the large screen seems to be the biggest cause for this. The 3GS' hardware isn't great, but it's only powering a 320*480 display
  - mikeash 14y ago
    The 3GS effectively has better hardware than the iPad 1. CPU, RAM, etc. are basically the same, but the iPad has to drive about five times as many pixels. Thus it effectively has much less RAM, an underpowered CPU/GPU, etc. It's an odd and unintuitive situation, but despite being newer than the 3GS, the original iPad is ultimately a less powerful device, when it comes to which apps and OS releases it can support. I'm sure Apple could support iOS 6 if they wanted to, but I imagine they decided that it wasn't worth the tradeoffs (e.g. poor performance, RAM available to apps, resulting stability or lack thereof).
ynniv 14y ago
Yes, this is a misstep for an app of this nature. Instapaper needs to support the iPad 1 for another cycle.

navs 14y ago

I'd love to see this as a webapp. I'm one of those folks that just doesn't use apps or even sign in to my apple account. I'm sure more of my kind exist. EDIT: Whoops I see this has paid in-app purchases. I wonder if there's something out there that can offer as seamless an experience as iTunes in-app purchases for webapps.

jasonlbaptiste 14y ago
Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.
jasonlbaptiste 14y ago
Someone should build a service on top of Stripe to do this.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Stripe for payment, Persona for auth.
smackfu 14y ago
Yeah, it's pretty depressing when the only reason a magazine is iOS only is because it uses Apple payments. I guess that was Apple's end goal, but it's just a sad state of affairs. And even if they wanted to use some other option... Apple would block it on iOS.
tjohns 14y ago
Have you looked at the digital goods API for Google Wallet? Docs: https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/ https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/ Demos: https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/samples https://developers.google.com/in-app-payments/docs/samples

k-mcgrady 14y ago

Interesting. First of all it's very nicely designed and after reading the introduction I like the philosophy behind it. Taking the Instapaper approach of focussing on text is interesting. While images and graphics can often enhance content having nice, plain text on a device the size of the iPhone makes much more sense. So first impressions of it are good. Hopefully the content is just as good. Update: After reading a couple of the articles it seems pretty high quality and justifies the price. It's also only the second good Newsstand app I've used (The New York Times is the other). I've tried several others and they are just 100's of space consuming images, difficult to read especially on the iPhone.

andycroll 14y ago
The Guardian UK have a lovely iPad app, but the iPhone app isn't nearly as good.
guiambros 14y ago
Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' that permeates the magazine industry. Each issue of Wired is now 500+ MB (due to the Retina displays). If you're on 3G or at a public WiFi, it probably takes more time to download than to read the 2-3 articles you're interested. In hindsight, you wouldn't expect anything different from Marco. Really hope he succeeds.
- S4M 14y ago
  > Agree. It's refreshing to see something simple and focused on the content: no images, no videos, no fancy infographics, and none of the 'bloatware' that permeates the magazine industry. HN is also like that.

moron 14y ago

I'm more of a fan of Marco-the-Instapaper-developer than Marco-the-fledgling-pundit, but I really want to read that Alex Payne article. Hmmm.

squarecat 14y ago

Another victim is seduced by a leading "The", causing any attempt to reference this publication to become a tragedy of grammar.

jeffehobbs 14y ago
Look, man. Unique naming is hard in the Age of Google. And it could be worse, it could be "the.magazi.ne".
- mikeash 14y ago
  Unique naming is easy. For example, he could have called it "D12792B3-4D86-4E84-8B3C-13DBA7593282". Coming up with unique names that are also useful and good is perhaps somewhat harder.
shortformblog 14y ago
The Strokes, The Walkmen and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs would like to have a word with you.
- regomodo 14y ago
  The Beatles?
- 89a 14y ago
  They're not called "The Band" though are they
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    No, but "The Band" was. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Band
- re_todd 14y ago
  And especially "The The".

smackfu 14y ago

It seems like I am the target audience for this. I listen to his podcast, follow his blog, and read tons of other Apple & tech blogs. And use Instapaper. But I really have no desire to pay a monthly fee for more articles. So I guess I'm opting out of this one.

Osmium 14y ago

It doesn't surprise me that it takes an AAA iOS developer to finally make a good iOS magazine. It always struck me that Newsstand was a wasted potential: full of good publications trying to squeeze their paper format into an app instead of releasing the same content in a better format. Does anybody know of "good" Newsstand apps? This might be the first. I personally think Apple should release a more aggressive Newsstand API and a best practices guide: e.g. by all means customise your design and experience but that doesn't mean you should release an app crammed full of pngs that weighs half a gig. Newsstand apps should be low bandwidth and text-centric. Why can't I search all my magazines from a central location? Why can't I see a central list of articles I've favourited from a variety of publications? As it stands, the only way to do this is with an RSS reader or Instapaper. I'd be happy to pay for quality journalism if it was in a format that's convenient and sensible.

tstegart 14y ago
Not all of us magazine makers are coders. For a lot of us, its all about the words, not the format. My little iPad-only travel magazine isn't even in Newsstand because I have no idea how to code it, but our articles have won awards. The technology is not as important as the content. I wish I could do all those things you mentioned, but the fact is I have no idea how. A big magazine might be able to do them, but it requires a total revamp of business practices and a restructuring of workflow. And that's hard when a magazine is staffed by people who will lose their jobs when digital magazines take off.
- Osmium 14y ago
  And that's precisely why Apple should be releasing an API to help you :) to reduce the burden of coding something yourself. That's one of the big problems right now. A lot of magazines are using Adobe InDesign to publish their iOS magazine apps, because that's all they know how to use but it's not helping anyone because, instead of making something new, Adobe bolted-on iOS publishing to a tool designed to make paper products. Someone else needs to step in and provide an appropriate tool that publishers (big or small) can use. I think it's fair to say we all want to see a way good journalism can exist in a digital world. There's no reason these people need lose their jobs if we can crack this problem. As an aside, care to share a link to your travel magazine? I'd be interested in checking it out. I'm travelling to Japan for the first time tomorrow.

ZanderEarth32 14y ago

I'd really like to give this a shot but am only interested in trying it on my iPad which can't get iOS6, so unfortunately, rather than passing on this, I am being left behind.

k-mcgrady 14y ago
It's worth trying on your iPhone (if you have one). It uses the text-only approach of Instapaper so screen-size doesn't affect usability the way it does in standard magazine apps.
owenfi 14y ago
It's worth sending that feedback to Marco. He has said in Build and Analyze that the iOS 5 version is written (just disabled currently) and he is curious whether he should release support for it in a version rev or if he can abandon it.

lutusp 14y ago

> "The Magazine: For geeks like us" ... geeks "like us" who only care about iOS and are willing to pay for content. Just to be accurate. Not that there's anything wrong with paying for content. Every time you're confronted by an ad that you didn't volunteer to look at, you're paying for content. But iOS-only seems like quite a limitation, and seems to contradict "for geeks like us" as the headline appears in HN.

mjb 14y ago
I don't have a problem paying for content, but I do have a problem with IOS-only. Even though I own an iPad, I like to have access to my reading material in multiple places. I spend a bunch more time looking at my Kindle, for example, and prefer the reading experience there to the iPad. A decade ago, something like this published in the closed formats of the time (MS Word, maybe) would have met with a huge backlash. Today, it seems like Apple have convinced the market that 'closed' is OK, because it's well-designed and a little bit shiny. I think it's a real step backward, especially given the great open standards that are available (like HTML5) and other tools which give similar control with more accessibility (like PDF).
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Today, it seems like Apple have convinced the market that 'closed' is OK ... Yes, to the degree that Microsoft has decided to imitate the Apple model. It seems Microsoft has closed Windows 8 to third-part applications (except pre-existing ones operating in compatibility mode). All Windows 8 apps that depend on Windows 8 features can only be gotten from Microsoft directly, in an obvious imitation of the App store: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/developers-windows-8/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/developers-windows-8/ What's worse, these cyber-birdcages seem wildly popular.
- guiambros 14y ago
  I also share the concern with an iOS-only model, but give him a break: it's just a 2 months proof-of-concept. He needs critical mass in order to make this sustainable in the long term - without having to resort to ads, sponsored reviews and all sorts of ways to keep the quality. The choice for iOS for the initial platform seems obvious: it's much easier to monetize quickly. And it's easy to add Kindle, Android, HTML5 and others later on - at the cost of maintaining multiple versions, provided that there's enough interested paying subscribers to justify the effort. I think that's exactly the right approach, and a real step forward.

89a 14y ago

Newsstand? ugh!

mirtes 14y ago

All the articles are available on-line at http://the-magazine.org/1 http://the-magazine.org/1 which is useful for sharing and reading on other devices. I wonder how much evil it would be to create an RSS feed for it.

ThomasQue 14y ago
Those are excerpts :/

revelation 14y ago

This mostly seems to be a magazine for Apple afficionados. And thats a terrible thing, because there is nothing geeky about that company or even company worship.