Wired’s Magazine App For iPad Won’t Work On The iPad – Oops!

By Leander Kahney (9:20 am, Feb 03 2010)

Wired Magazine built an interactive version of the print publication for the iPad -- using Adobe's Air. But like Flash, Air isn't supported on the device. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

My old friends at Wired tell me that the magazine’s designers scrambled to finished their gorgeous digital version of the publication just in time for Apple’s big iPad launch last week.

Trouble is, the interactive prototype was built using Adobe’s Air — which means it won’t work on the very device it was built for. Like Flash, Apple isn’t supporting Air on the iPad.

“The magazine industry was hoping to finally get over the pay wall with a fancy, shmancy iPad version of their precious slick glossy (but) gets caught with their pants down and their wee wees out,” said one insider.

According to chatter, the app was stunning and fulfilled a long-held dream of Wired’s executives — to recreate the glossy mag experience in a digital format (and most importantly, the ads).

Wired’s was just one of several digital magazines built in mad, rumor-fueled run up to the iPad — but is likely the only working app. Demos from Sports Illustrated and others were just that: demos.

Built with help from parent company Condé Nast, the digital mag is easily ported from layouts in Adobe InDesign, the magazine industry standard. Wired’s designers slaved over it for months, significantly improving on the demo shown off last November in New York (see the video after the jump).

But one little problem: Apple has rejected Adobe technologies like Flash and Air — with extreme prejudice. No one at Condé Nast appears to have seen that coming, even though the iPhone OS hasn’t supported Flash since its launch in 2007.

All’s not lost though. Adobe’s upcoming Creative Suite 5 will allow Flash apps to be ported as native iPhone apps. Though not a sure thing, it’s likely Adobe will add similar capabilities for Air apps before the software ships.

Wired didn’t respond to a request for comment.

(Full disclosure: Until last April, I was the news editor for the Wired.com website).

Via NYT: To Deliver, iPad Needs Media Deals.

Here’s a prototype of the interactive Wired magazine that was shown off at an event last November in New York.

18 comments »

About the author

Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Apple, Apple Tablet, iPad, Media, News |

pidriu
In my opinon they re stupid they should know how apple works before desing anything they could read what apple said they could ask apple….
amateur job=epic fail
ss
dumb asses.
millenomi
So, the point is: “Prototype not built with final technology used by Apple tablet”. Of course, once one points out NO ONE knew which technology was used by the Apple tablet, if it existed at all, and that prototyping using what you know best before tackling the tech for the final product is extremely commonplace in the industry, the store seems to quickly deflate into a non-story. No?
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd John Dowdell
“In my opinon they re stupid they should know how apple works before desing anything….”
That’s why folks at Adobe keep pressing for a little better communication, honest and open, with Apple’s executive level…. ;-)
jd/adobe
millenomi
That should’ve been: “the whole thing seems to quickly deflateâ€¦”.
http://developer.openplug.com Guilhem
Hi Leander
I have a solution for your friends at Wired: OpenPlug (my company) does a plugin to the Adobe AIR IDE (thats called Flex Builder) that allows to rebuild Flex/AIR apps as native apps for iPhone / iPad.
They can check us out at: http://developer.openplug.com
All hope is not lost then …
http://www.openscreenproject.org/ Aniket Ray
Well, we at Adobe and other members of the Open Screen Project always welcome new devices and screens to help create better experiences.
Adobe AIR has become a successful flash application technology for rich desktop applications.
If any readers, have any interesting applications ideas that they would want to create for multiple screen platforms, they should check how their flash applications run as a native iPhone applicaion using the Packager for iPhone.
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/01/building_ipad_apps.html
Charli
what’s the trauma, they have a month to redo it. big whoop
Baltimora
They have over a month to redo it.
And they probably only spent 2-3 weeks of work doing the original (Air-based) app, as this was admitted by many of the “partners” that partnered with Apple and demo’d some of their apps during the SJ keynote. For example, Wall Street Journal said they were only given 2 weeks notice to produce their app for the iPad, to make it in time for the demo during SJ’s announcement.
Of course, the REALLY good and fully functional slick apps will take months to produce, and really can’t be done until the App developers have absorbed and taken time with the latest released iPhone SDK. I don’t expect those apps to appear until late 2010. Just being realistic.
Maxx
Same thing happened to me. I wrote this great iPhone app in latin and stupid XCode wouldn’t even compile it. Apparently you need to use something called Objective-C which is some sort of “computer language”
ad astra per aspera, indeed.
finePrint
but you just said it was a “prototype.” now just produce the real thing. if its that big of an issue i would still use the air application on my desktop.
Scott
I’m a little concerned about magazine publishers frothing at the mouth for ad-revenue. I already rip out about 25% of the pages in Wired every month because there’s literally 0 non-ad content on those pages. If reading on a tablet is going to constantly interupt me with ads, there’s a darn good chance I’ll stick to RSS and/or print.
Montana Bob
The model is simple, really. Be willing to pay for subscription costs, and the annoying ads go away (for your tablet).
it’s not a new concept, just FYI
Andrew Morton
And what exactly is the issue? Adobe AIR for Mobile has not even been demonstrate in any other platform, planning to have it in a unannounced product is just plain silly.
Zeke Koch
Ahh, I think I see the confusion. There are something like 33 Apps in the iPhone App Store build using the Flash Packager for iPhone. See http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ for more information about this technology. The Flash Packager for iPhone is actually based on AIR (our platform for stand-alone applications) which is in turn based on Flash Technology.
I haven’t see the code for the prototype referred to above, but it would likely work in the Flash Packager for iPhone.
Marco
I find it hard to believe that the designers at Wired didn’t stop to consider that Apple had been pretty clearly set against supporting Flash in its mobile platforms.
I understand that Flash is pretty ubiquitous on the web these days, but I am definitely in the camp rallying for its demise. (I am constantly force-quitting Flash in Snow Leopard, and it is a terrible resource hog.)
I equate it to the original iMac offering only USB ports. At the time there was little to no support for USB peripherals, but it was the right decision to look beyond the status quo.
Moombe
What is soooooooooo funny with Mac addict is that they believe any company only wants to develop for Mac hardware. The fact is I believe Wired did a great thing with this Air-based application – we have on the radar for 2010 plenty of Android-based tablets with great hardware specs (much higher than those of the iPad), and it has been demonstrated to both Flash and Air work flawlessly on these upcoming tablets.
Who cares about the iPad ? Not Wired readers :-)
http://twitter.com/TroyMc Troy McConaghy
Adobe AIR may not have worked on iOS in the past, but it does now.