Adobe AIR + Wired Magazine Demo

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

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…)

Don’t Make Me Scroll

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

This is the short version of a presentation on online magazines we’ve been working on here at Redub. It ends with a link to an in-development demo that features content from GOOD’s Transportation Issue 015. Casey Caplowe (GOOD’s Creative Director) generously gave us the InDesign files for the entire issue and we re-figured some of the content so it fit on the screen natively. We even had to re-imagine the Transparencies because they just didn’t work just throwing the original (for-print) image up on the screen (which is what most publishers do sadly) — since we didn’t have the high resolution of print, we took advantage of the screen’s native attributes, namely, animation. I’d even posit that what the screen lacks in dots per inch it more than makes up for in dots per inch per second.

There are still features we are hinting at but that we’re still working on adding, like annotation (which is the biggie). We’re laying in the sharing stuff now.

Oh, and as far as search engine optimization is concerned, we’re working on a solution for that. Right now all of the content is stored as XML in a database (modeled on WordPress). We just have to build a front-end for it that spiders can crawl all over.

And feedback is welcome!

Netprotozo Grid Generator at #4

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Web Design Booth has a rundown of 15 Extremely Useful Grid Generators, and collaborator, co-conspiritor and partner, Netprotozo’s Grid Generator comes in at #4 (though it’s not clear if they are ranked in order of usefulness)! Rock on, Karl! Encore!!

(IMHO, we’ve tried many of these grid generators, and while they all have excellent qualities, the Netprotozo grid generator has many intrinsic advantages, namely the flexibility and robustness that comes from having been empoyed in many real-world projects. Karl’s really done a great job of incorporating some critical elements which allow things like inter-column padding, and an underlying base unit which is an incredibly powerful concept not present in many other CSS grid systems.)