The Wired Tablet App: A Video Demonstration
Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Above, you'll see a video, narrated by Jeremy and Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, who led our tablet team, that shows more.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wired's video demo of the Wired Reader arrives weeks after Apple told developers in December 2009 to get apps ready for its still-unannounced tablet, and days after the confirmed public falling-out between Adobe and Apple over Flash being left off the iPad. Unveiling the Reader at TED alongside Adobe's Jeremy Clark therefore reads as more than a design showcase — it is a publisher openly building its tablet future with the company Apple is freezing out.
The clip, narrated by Clark and creative director Scott Dadich, extends the first glimpse shown at TED into a fuller demonstration of how a print-designed monthly translates to a multitouch screen. It also gives Adobe a flagship answer to its confirmed predicament: with Flash excluded from Apple's device, the viable route to the tablet is stand-alone apps — a path Adobe had already laid out when it announced Flash Professional CS5 with iPhone application support back in October 2009.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a marquee Condé Nast title effectively campaigning for its unreleased tablet ahead of launch, while Adobe gets a high-profile demonstration that its CS5 packaging route produces the kind of rich magazine apps Apple wants on the device.
- Wired's editorial and design teams, led by Scott Dadich, now have a working prototype that sets the internal benchmark for what the magazine's first tablet edition must deliver.
Second-order effects
- Rival consumer magazines face pressure to match Wired's interactive layout standard or ship inferior PDF-style replicas, pushing publishers toward bespoke tablet design budgets they have not previously carried.
- Adobe can point to the Wired Reader as proof-of-concept in its standoff with Apple, strengthening its argument that banning Flash-derived apps would cost the App Store exactly the kind of premium publishing content Apple needs at launch.
Third-order effects
- If the tablet becomes a primary distribution channel for magazines, the industry's economics tilt toward app-store gatekeepers: Apple controls approval and revenue terms, and disputes like the current Flash exclusion become fights over which authoring tools publishers are permitted to use.
- A successful Wired Reader would mark the beginning of the end of the web browser as the default delivery surface for glossy publishing, replacing it with per-title native applications designed in tools like Adobe's.
The trend: Magazine publishing is retooling around tablet-native editions co-built with Adobe, just as Apple's platform rules turn authoring-tool choice into a strategic battleground.