Tuesday 10 May 2011

Analysis of the Wired magazine’s iPpad App

Okey, so this is my review of the Wired Magazines app for the iPad. Currently the magazine only offers their US version in the iPad form, which is a bit of a shame since I personally prefer the UK version. The ads in the magazine are basically meant for the US market and the magazine has a lot of video clip ads that increase the file size of magazine quite a bit. The magazine I’m reviewing is over 500 megabytes. Of course this is good for the advertisers since they can rest assured that there won’t any connection issues with the viewing of their ads.


The content of the app is structured like a traditional magazine. I use swipe to get from one page to another and in some cases I can interact with a piece of content to pinch and zoom in to see it better. The pages are balanced between static pages that don’t allow any user action with ad pages and pages with some interactive elements to them.


The layout of the pages follows the paper magazines layout a bit too much. The paper magazine contains some thin lines / frames, which work well in the paper version but here they simply seem unnecessary and at times little confusing to me. The style should be kept simpler in my opinion or the lines could be replaced with something else.


All and all it’s one of the best iPad magazines I’ve come across but it still lacks in innovation and differentiation. Most of the content in the app is also available on the website that is free. Paying £2.99 for doesn’t make much sense to me since most of the interactive stuff in the app are nothing more than little gimmicks that make the magazine more interesting but not worth paying for. If the amount of ads won’t wear you out then the lack of innovation will. Some of the videos and sounds are cool and at some points you see the potential the magazine has. As it is though I wouldn’t recommend it.

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