Jon Gilkison over at InterfaceLab, on Wired’s iPad edition:
There are certain interactive elements to the articles, but – and I apologize to all of the people who put in a lot of back breaking work into this – they’re pretty lame. Tapping on a button-looking element switches out part of the page with another image. You can drag your finger across certain images to make them sort of animate like a flipbook (and in truth, that’s what it is – a series of PNG or JPEG images). There are videos you can tap on to view fullscreen. There are audio clips that you can play. The interactivity in the Wired application is very 1990’s. I am not trying to be insulting either, it’s simply the truth. The Wired application has pretty much brought back image rollovers.
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The problem with these XML + images architectures is that they are essentially reinventing HTML with no added benefit. When I showed the Wired app to a colleague of mine, someone I consider to be one of the top HTML/Javascript developers in NYC, his assessment was the same: Why the heck didn’t they use HTML5? We stepped through each “page” of the Wired application, looked at each interactive piece – but failed to find anything that ruled out the use of HTML and JavaScript.
I stand by what I said the other day — that the Wired app is fantastic, but at the same time it is very disappointing after reading this and spending a few days with the app. After reading almost the entire thing, it’s obvious the app isn’t as cool as it seems when you first open it. Which is a bummer.
Hopefully the design — and more importantly the technology behind the design — will continue to evolve.