Robot Loves Kitten

With all the excitement about the iPad and digital magazines, more and more publishers are porting their print content (with bonuses), which of course, is exactly what they shouldn’t do. Is building a “paged” app actually misguided? Look at Twitter for iPad: it seamlessly blends information about people, conversations, and all their shared urls. It’s like a limitless choose your own adventure game. You can get lost in it.

The truth is, there is NO page. The page is an analog print concept. Digital doesn’t have those limitations, and restricting your app this way is little more than knee-capping yourself before the start of the race.

And speaking of which, there’s one trick the Twitter iPad app pulled off that deserves more attention: by using an app (not to mention being more of an Internet, rather than Web, service), Twitter can fire up an instance of mobile Safari and frame every linked website with impunity.

I still think building HTML5 powered web apps is the way to go, but in this shareable remix-happy culture, being able to safely load up any web site within your app is a massive win.

Two ideas have been rattling around in my head lately. Hopefully, I will find the time to do some actual experimenting.

Programmatic design: based on ideas in Less Framework, which adjusts layout based on viewing device, and Flipboard, which incorporates several grid and article layouts when composing pages. Article layout would be dependent on factors like word length, and presence of images or other media. Page layout would be dependent on the articles and their layouts. This would freshen up the page with new layouts, while not requiring designers to individually hand-craft each layout.

Given the rich structure and metadata stored in the modern CMS, this idea can and frankly should be applied just about everywhere. I’d probably start with a simple programmatic WordPress theme to test out ideas.

Graduated or staged designs: I was just wondering this morning whether web redesigns might be better received if they were broken into stages, like an evolution — tiny changes, applied consistently over time, such that users aren’t overwhelmed with newness, but rather acclimated slowly.

This is how websites generally work anyway, there’s always changes and improvements occurring daily. I’m not sure, however, that’s it’s possible to do in practice. Perhaps if redesigns are approached atomically, where individual elements were redesigned and implemented continuously, or more unlikely, large redesigns were broken up into more atomic elements and then those elements were broken into stages.

Perhaps it’s just too much work, or maybe there’s a way to simply automate the process. For elements defined purely with CSS, you could input beginning and ending styles, along with the number of desired “keyframes”, and generate a set of transition styles. We can already do this with SASS, so building a meta-framework to manage these transitions wouldn’t be too difficult.

I’ve been downloading just about every iPad magazine app I can find, and so far, the results are disappointing. It’s early in the race, but I’m starting to wonder if print designers are simply fish out of water when it comes to digital media.

Wired’s iPad app is crisp, but it’s a 2-dimensional light-board experience. Similar to how “interactive awards” really only go to animated Flash websites, Wired’s nod to “digital magazine” doesn’t really get beyond embedded video.

Interview’s app is pretty, but frankly kind of a disaster. The “curling page” animation is so antiquated that maybe I’m supposed to think it’s retro?

I downloaded the Mac Life issue about the iPad, because I got a new iPad. It’s basic, and a little slow, but the lack of an embedded web browser is really frustrating. Despite putting together a mega-list of great apps, there’s no links, even to the app store. What exactly is the point of an app listicle beyond getting readers to buy the apps in the store? Why increase the friction?

Flipboard bills itself as a social mag, and on many levels it succeeds, but it’s just too shallow an experience. They’ve started with a comfortable balance between content and social, but I think they’re going to need to pick a direction. Though I can leave comments, it’s not a complete social interface. And having to open shared articles outside the app interrupts the Flipboard experience. All that said, I really like the Flipboard stiff page animation, it creates an interesting perspective effect as you turn, and you are in full control of the turn as your move your finger, creating a fun little game, if you will.

Lessons so far?

There’s an important concept in online media I’m calling “presence.” Presence is how readers perceive and rely on your coverage of a topic. It’s essentially a measure of your performance or effectiveness. The Economist is successful because it is perceived to have presence in global news. Local newspapers are failing in part because they don’t have presence in local communities. Presence, in the digital age, is continuous and real-time. Another way of saying this is, when I decide to read your product, I expect it to be fresh — even if we’re talking a few hours since our last interaction. How you implement presence is the real trick, but if you want avid readers, you’re gonna need to build presence into your product.

Flipboard has presence, but no depth: I have to leave to interact or read content.

Wired has depth, but no presence: There’s nothing new waiting for me in the morning. I pay for a package of articles and that’s it. No social media, no Wired.com articles. This is an opportunity missed.

Mac Life shows that your mag will suffer wIthout an integrated Web browser (this is not difficult to implement, btw). It opens up whole new worlds of possibility: every digital mag can be its own Aol (the old, portal-style Aol, that is).

Lastly, let’s talk about how many transition effects video editors have at their disposal. Like 1,000, more? Can we just bury the curly page animation, already?

In the next magazine I download, I want each page turn to be an explosion! Now that would be sweet.