It has been a while since we warmed up the old iPhone (it runs on teeny tiny vacuum tubes, you know) and checked out what magazines are trying to do with the cuddliest gadget on the planet. The iphone offers print publishers a remarkable palette. In miniature, it is more like a printed page than any other digital device. It is portable and handheld, mimicking the magazine in those respects better than Web sites. It is lushly colored and sharp as a pin, far superior aesthetically to that Kindle thing Amazon keeps trying to sell us. And it has a newsstand, the app store, that allows for some degree of merchandising – albeit not enough. And yet, few magazine brands really have leveraged the iPhone very effectively. The earliest entry, Conde Nast’s Style.com, probably remains the best. Visually striking, it gives the user a very simple interface that uncovers a trove of multimedia assets that play very well on a small portrait screen.
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