Why most iPad news apps are bad: They restrict you to an 'isolated, one-person web'
At SXSW, Aron Pilhofer, the New York Times' interactive editor points out
what is bad with most iPad news applications:
"I'm sceptical about apps generally. It takes you out of the web. You come in to this isolated, one-person web..."
Why The "killer app" on every handset is the good old browser
Aron says,
"There's so little you cannot do with offline storage in the browser environment that to me [the iPad] is almost not worth the investment.
Apps are so anti-community
Aron says,
"Community is a place where the web is your friend and the app is not. If you consider community to be part of the answer to the future of news then going into the partially-stilted environment of the application walks away from that."
iPad news apps are minor footnotes in digital publishing history
This is what Khoi Vinh, who once headed the digital publishing design unit at the the New York Times, thinks. Khoi says,
The future...is in the multiplatform browser - publishing's "natural home".
Related:
Are iPad news apps glorified CD ROMs?
Labels: ipad, trends
iPad-based magazines are bloated and user-unfriendly
...they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They're bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
Khoi thinks magazine-mode is dead:
...a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all - a problem that's abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city - with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you - these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.
Via Kottke.org
Also read this:
Labels: ipad
Are iPad News Applications Merely Glorified CD ROMs?
The iPad news application is an eye-candy business model. But fancy page-flips, large icons, large photos, interactive advertisements that track your activity won't force users to pay up in the long run. For people like me, long weaned on a free, hyper-linked internet, aka the web, iPad applications are nothing more than expensive, glorifed CD ROMs of the mid-1990s era.
Google News has a basic page flip and you do not need to pay up. When broadband becomes ubiquitous, what's stopping websites in having all the bells & whistles in the iPad style?
Interfacelab
analyzed Wired magazine much-hyped iPad app, which sold upwards of $100,000 in first 4 hours of sales, basically due to the
'novelty factor'. Interfacelab says about Wired's application:
The only real differentiation between the Wired application and a [1990s] multimedia CD-ROM is the delivery mechanism. While providing little interactivity other than a fancy page-flip, the application is made of XML and images, including two for the text of each page in portrait and landscape mode. This seems to be why the application is 500MB.
On the other hand, an iPad application that has lots of
3D models and visualizations is something that users might like. Are news organizations listening?
Labels: ipad, news business
