WIRED Magazine – iPad App of the Week

WIRED Magazine – iPad App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at the various iPhone and iPad Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive. Though called iPhone App of the Week, most of these apps will work on the iPod touch or the iPad, some will be iPad only apps.

This week’s App is WIRED Magazine.

Free with each episode costing £2.39

I know, I know, I can hear you saying, “haven’t you done this one before?”

Well yes I have.

I reviewed the Wired app when it first came out and at the time I did wonder if I would buy any more issues…

Well here we are four months later and yes you can ask what’s happening with Wired now.

Well the first thing that was changed was changing the app from a app that was a whole magazine to an app that allows you to purchase and download individual issues within a single app.

This means that you have a single icon on your iPad for Wired rather than an icon for each issue. What was annoying was that I had to re-download issue one again!  The size of each issue has dropped, the first issue was something like 500MB, newer issues are about 250MB. Still big and something that you wouldn’t want to download using 3G. So you can see why I was initially annoyed with the change in app format.

So have things changed?

Firstly I have bought more issues, that is something that I think is quite telling in terms of how I feel about the app.

So yes I am buying further issues.

Though I am reading the magazine, I am not seeing huge leaps in the interface or sophisticated exciting ways of engaging with the content.

It has to be said that the content is more interactive and engaging than the content on the web. I don’t think this is a feature of the iPad or the iPad interface, more that publishes aren’t really using the web in a similar way. Most magazine articles I see on the web are just text versions of the printed article. Occasionally I see links and embedded video, but more often it is just text.

Though what I am seeing with Wired is more of the same type of engaging and interesting content, that I don’t see on the Wired website. The content is the US version of Wired, no UK version available.

I am pleased to see that each issue on the iPad is cheaper than the paper version (though I know that is not the case with all iPad magazines).

So based on my experience of using the Wired App over the last four months, I am still buying issues of Wired, I am still reading Wired.

I am still impressed and enjoying the reading experience. In many ways it was a similar experience to reading WIRED magazine, but the enhancements did add to the experience.

This is though, still very much old media trying to use new tools to sell a traditional old media type experience.

I would recommend it, if the type of content you find in Wired is your cup of tea.

3 thoughts on “WIRED Magazine – iPad App of the Week”

Leave a Reply