Push Pop Press — Our Choice by Al Gore. Watch the video in HD, if you can. It’s really impressive. (via Gruber)
The past year since the first iPad went on sale has been littered with all kinds of book/magazine publishers trying to build the foundation of a 21st century publishing empire on these new devices. And, almost to a man, they’ve all failed miserably. Mainly because they’ve been trying to “spruce up” what they’ve always been doing: simply words on a page.
But even with that as their goal, they’ve utterly failed to meet the bare minimum of requirements that modern tech-friendly readers have. WIRED Magazine is a big example, particularly since they inked a huge deal with Adobe to handle all of their development. But, as nicely as WIRED as designed (and yes, that’s debatable), their magazine app for iPad is a horrendous user experience. Essentially, every page is published as a huge JPEG graphic. I wish I were kidding.
Then there’s Rupert Murdoch’s big subscription venture, The Daily. Reviews haven’t been so much mixed, as they have been condemning. The user experience is bad, the UI is bad, the content isn’t particularly compelling…The Daily is essentially dead in the water.
Mostly, from what I can gather, all of the biggest failures in publishing-for-tablets have been attributable to the parent companies’ simple inability to hire the right people for the job. People who know how to design, AND develop, AND cater to the needs of the 2011 reader, AND cater to the capabilities of a device that was barely dreamed of just a few years ago.
With the Adobe/WIRED deal (and the fruits of their labor), it became pretty clear that Adobe has been resting on their laurels for SO long that they are now simply too far out of touch to handle such a big task for such a new market.
With the release of this new book from Push Pop Press, I think someone has finally nailed it, from all sides. The design is lovely, the interaction is intuitive, the information graphics are very smartly built (and interactive in creative ways). All of these things would not have been possible if they had tried developing this book with old-world tools. They came at it from a different angle: they’re Cocoa developers. They know how to program for a multitouch device, and make a compelling interface. So that’s what they did. The result looks and feels like time and attention was put into it, because it was. And the price, for such a hand-crafted, interactive, vast piece of work is only five bucks. Five dollars (iTunes link), and I can read/view/interact with this book on my iPad or iPhone; it’s a universal app for iOS.
Seriously: more of this, please.
