The demos are getting more and more realistic (first Mag+, now this). My initial reax:

1. It took a whole team from Adobe partnering with the staff of Wired Magazine to do this demo. The tools aren’t there yet, but publishers, your newsrooms and staff need to look and work like this. Right now, I don’t think they’re geared for this type of production. Yet.
2. The question is what hardware is it running on? Can it run on any old tablet that supports multi-touch (not an iPad)? Who makes such a device?
3. Does the video have to play full-screen or can it play inline?
4. Can you resize the text? I don’t think you can. To me, it looks like they’re taking the assets from the InDesign layout and converting to Flash/Flex/AIR.
5. HTML5 and CSS3+ Javascript can’t necessarily pull this off yet. Another big “YET”. jQTouch, I’m waiting…
6. I foresee an app per publication, not per issue, which means for books, you’ll buy the Penguin app, and the Knopf app, and pay a subscription fee to get particular chapters of books. In terms of magazines, you’ll buy the Wired app and the GOOD app, e.g., and pay a subscription fee to get particular issues. The question is sharing…

UPDATE: from Wired itself:

The content was created in Adobe InDesign, as is the case for the print magazine, with the same designers adding interactive elements, from photo galleries and video to animations, along with adapting the designs so it looks great in both portrait and landscape orientation. This is a departure from the usual web model, where a different team repurposes magazine content into HTML, unavoidably losing much of the visual context in the process. Wired.com is not a re-purposed version of the magazine, but rather an separately-produced news service.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration/#ixzz0fjhurJU8

(Putting nose back to grindstone…)

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