Over the last month and a half, I’ve been extremely frustrated with all the failed magazine attempts with the iPad. It’s obvious the iPad is a perfect platform that provides the ability to create a full-blown multimedia product, but all the magazines I’ve wasted money on have disappointed. Today, the WIRED app was launched and I wanted to provide my thoughts.
What I Like
There are several built in goodies that helps take this brilliant magazine to the next level. The magazine is deep with content, interactive with videos, sound bytes, animations and other fun stuff. The best part for me is that it doesn’t require you to have a WiFi connection as many other magazines do. The file is pretty large at over 500MB, but it’s well worth it to avoid any requirement for a WiFi connection.
Let’s take a look at one of the built in video functions. The play button can be found embedded within multiple pages. Clicking this button will launch a high definition video clip, such as the Toy Story 3 Trailer on the Cover Page (below).
One of my favorite features of the magazine is the 3D animation that takes advantage of the iPad multi-touch, giving you the ability to grab Mars and spin it around while learning about the various Mars missions.
Another interactive function built into this stunning iPad App is sliding your finger across a graphic to animate it, such as the “assemble the Lego Lamborghini” feature. You start out with one lego and by simply sliding your finger either right or left will construct or deconstruct your lego vehicle as fast or slow as you want to go.
Similar to the “assemble the lego Lamborghini feature, Pop-Up Physics uses the same finger swipe technique and animates flipping through a pop-up book. It was just too cool not to mention.
Yet another fun and interactive feature section can be found in Constructing a Song, featuring Trent Reznor. By touching a series of 6 buttons, you get different images that appear and a progressive sound byte for each. So, while you’re reading about the Vocals, you can see the accompanying image and listen.
One last thing I wanted to cover is an interactive chart that helps display a plan to increase average vehicle speeds, while reducing delays and number of vehicles on the road. As you touch different graphics, such as Cars, the graph changes to display the appropriate data. Yet another fun and interesting way to take advantage of the iPad.
What I Don’t Like
With the good always comes the bad. A few things that turned me off a bit was the price, which can be had for $4.99 in the App Store. It’s expensive, especially when compared to the published magazine, but you can argue that this magazine is loaded with enough bells and whistles.
I love the sliding navigation bar you can activate by tapping the bottom and navigation isn’t difficult, but for some reason I am irritated not having page numbers on each page.
Full page ads are throughout this issue. It’s excessive and looks to be using the same amount of ads as the published magazine. This is a big bummer, but all the magazines are following this model and atleast some of the ads are intereractive with videos and animations.
So what do you think?
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