Fascinating motion magazine demo highlights iPad's potential - Page 3

Mmmm... what if the content were an ad, say for a BMW?

*

True, I don't think its about soup to nuts tools. We'll probably never see that again.

But the reason Flash is so ubiquitous is that there are easy to use tools for it and they allow creatives to produce discrete pieces of work without needing deep technical knowledge. Until similar tools are developed that allow some kind of chunking of work using HTML5, CSS3, & JS, Flash cannot not disappear. I think Apple and others are working on it, but while the tools Apple produces might be nice and influential, they are unlikely to be adequate only for limited applications.

I get it. But the way people toss about the terms "easily done" cracks me up. Nothing about this is easy. Or inexpensive. For a subscription, I think you need a template App that receives the latest publication, not a brand new App for each release. Something this complex is just not practical for a magazine to consider for repeat issues. The whole thing is a stunt.

The [semi] unique thing was that the still pictures in the magazine had limited movement to provide interest and enhance the content. Much like Ken Burns used panning and zooming of photographs to create award winning videos.

There are several ways to deal with still images:

1) Ken Burns effect
2) Separate into layers, and move a camera though the layers
3) generate intermediate images (tweening)

Here, the creators used a special camera that allowed a [relatively] small amount of movement to be shot at a very high quality and a very high frame-rate video. Then, the were able to playback at a lower frame-rate to give the effect of a picture that moved (rather than a video).

*

Which is one big reason Flash is getting so much bad press. The creatives don't know jack about programming and hence the applications they publish are not optimized at all, causing major discontent among end users.

Exactly my point. Newer communication forms don't replace, they glom on and add to the experience. But intrinsically people seek appropriate experiences for the situation and these tend to parallel the form. So the add ons need to be in line with and appropriate to the experience of that form.

I like the Dear Abby thing --chat/blog/tweets can go with that. Its an environment that can be noisy.
Readers also write in to magazines but this needs to be a bit more thoughtful, or it just becomes noise. They typically are more like a conversation and are edited for relevance, etc. Part of this is the form influencing the experience, but people also seek the form that fits with the experience they desire.

So the form influences the experience influences the form. Since the form is evolving rather than being replaced, they need to respect the existing experience (although radically new ones may also come about too -- different form, different audience different experience.)

Spoken like a programmer.
Its a team thing content, looks, function, strategy. If any one sucks, they all suck. Frankly not too many programmers are very good at any of the other three.
And how can a designer screw up stop motion animation? Is that a programming task?

By the way, it used to be that you had to have a programmer do markup for page layout of books. Do you think that's the way it should be?

But, what if the content were an ad. and the ad were to appear in several magazines?

That would change the economics.

Also these techniques could be applied to existing content (text and images) without the need for a shoot involving actors, photographers, etc.

You could take a client with an existing portfolio of [ad] content and a limited budget and put together a compelling presentation using post production, alone.

*

All cultures have been moving toward some kind of online digital democracy which is a nightmare for politicians where every voice that chimes in has equal weight and it is nearly impossible to tell professionals from clever amateurs from paranoid loons. It certainly requires more filtering and fact-checking on the part of people participating.

A truly interesting display of what's possible on the iPad, but with an equally in-your-face choice of subject-matter. With the recent purging of overtly sensual content from the App Store, one can only wonder how a subject like this would be treated in the approval process.

Here is my "I see the big picture and am smarter than everyone else" point of view (s/c):

1_ Some here are getting types of media confused -- you cannot compare this to WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, or even People Magazine -- this would not be that type of reading material. To me if a publication was to do something like this it would fit perfectly with Neo noir or Graphic Novels. It is a niche market, but a successful niche market where I think buyers will be willing to pay more for a 'living' graphic novel. Also, maybe a Travel book or some Nature type book would be successful, imagine they show you live travel spots in China - Great Wall, Yangtze River, Tiananmen Square, etc and you can read about each place and where to go. Or National Geographic could do wonders with this format. Etc.

2_ As for cost, as I said above if marketed to niche markets and/or as a 'plus' version to a magazine or book (ex. National Geographic Plus, Tour Beijing Plus, etc.) I think people will pay more and that would justify the production cost.

3_ I am also curious how this will be done if not using Flash, is it just a mp4 or QuickTime movie, or is it a mixture of those with HTML5? My guess is to get the interactivity its an HTML5 and mp4 video mix.

I think this is really cool and will help push for even more experimentation and out of the box thinking.

My 2cents.

:later.

To do this on the web, you would use HTML5 or Flash.

Off the top of my head, to do this on an iPad, you probably would write a generalized skeleton app that downloaded the content (text, images, video) along with a procedure that the skeleton app would use to create the desired presentation and interaction for this content.

For the next issue, the skeleton app would download the new content and procedure and create the new presentation.

You could consider this as processes similar to creating and presenting a Flash file.

However the iPad solution would be streamlined, low-overhead, high-performance, using only those features that make sense to the device, content and application at hand.

This is not without precedent as there are several iPhone apps that use this approach for games, etc.


*

Start with Flux which was designed for XHTML but is moving towards supporting HTML5 as well.

http://www.theescapers.com

You rotate the DIV in CSS. It can be done and there are tutorials on how to do it if you use Google because that's how I found them.

http://www.zachstronaut.com/posts/20...ox-webkit.html

Just as a basic example

Nice! Have not seen that before.

That's cool, but it's still a non-rendered plan system font... There also all the other bullets I listed... Again, I'm psyched for HTML5, but I've still seen nothing as media rich as what you can do in flash.... Again, if there are good links id love to see them....

It's really interesting to read the reactions to the demo; some of them quite negative. A very important issue to consider is that the video clip does not in any way give us a good sense of what it's like to read a magazine like this on an iPad. This was a video clip, which makes everything look way more dynamic than it would be if you actually read the magazine. So I reserve judgement about how this style would work with a device that you hold in your lap and flip pages every few minutes. The sum of the experience is a function of the video elements, the film noir style or whatever style is used, and the tone that's conveyed through the words on the page.

There isn't, and even if there was there would still be no development kit to make it as easy to create as with Flash. When it finally does best Flash in every aspect, if ever, it will be a very long time now. HTML10 and CSS12? Who knows, but that isn't really the point of the real issues with Flash, namely: Flash is still not efficient and effective on mobile devices with limited battery life and the HTML5 video tag is so much more efficient than Flash for delivering video that even when Flash 10.1 gets released for all Android phones it still won't likely be the primary method for delivering video in the future.

Yes, but there is time and money to save on materials and printing process, delivering paper media to readers... and those savings can translate into this new presentation approach. All of those clips don't really look like something that takes more than 5 minutes to film (OK, an hour with makeup and costume changes) and don't require expensive actors to feature (though I would not be surprised to see a big name or two in some cases, should this really comes to life).

On the other hand, all this "live action" does distract from actual reading... but that is us, people used to dead letters and still images on paper or screen. It is like my parents' generation cant get video games - they were already too old when video gaming became mainstream. Likewise, we might be too old for some new things that will be commonly accepted among today's kids.

I second this sentiment. I'm in publishing and everyday I see how wasteful we can be producing even a single 1-color title due to bottleneck workflow practices. I welcome the iPad and these new digital content-interactive approaches. Certainly producing this new type of e-content will require new and better trained staff to pull this off. It's very likely expensive to start producing interactive ebooks/ezines, but like everything thing else, once you get the hang of it you can learn ways to reduce cost.

Honestly, damn if you do and damn if you don't because a lot of people already lost their jobs in publishing. I say there is no better time to learn something new and rethink what it means to read a book or magazine.

Very interesting source. Thanks.

Just as when "desktop publishing" first came to be, expect tons of overproduced visual garbage initially which will in turn lead to more refined design over time.

Yeah, I agree. I guess for me, for media rich sites like this, id still like the choice to turn Flash on.

Yeah but HTML5 and CSS3 support the @font-face tag which allows you to have a font sitting on your webserver and use that. I've tried it using a font I created using http://www.yourfonts.com it works perfectly so what you're thinking can't be done actually can very very simply.

As for the rest I don't think it would be that difficult. Flash's ActionScript is based on Javascript and seeing the stuff that's being done with JQuery and Protocol and the like I don't think it's as far away as you'd expect.

Pardon me for saying so, but I think a lot of you are really missing the point here.

- "Meh, I don't want to read magazines with distracting moving images" and "this just looks like a DVD menu" etc.

That's not the point here, people! This is a proof of concept - it's an experiment with the new possibilities on a new type of media device, not the final word on how every type of media should look on the iPad!

When Thomas Edison recorded the words of "Mary had a little lamb" on his newfangled phonograph, his point was not to say "this is the future of nursery rhymes". Is was to demonstrate the potential of audio recording as such. As we all know quite a few people picked up on that idea later on.

Likewise this little example isn't the final word on multi media on the iPad. It's the 21st century equivalent to Edisons "Mary had a little lamb" on the phonograph.
Please, look beyond the example, and try to see the potential. It may turn out to be as profound as Edisons phonograph in retrospect.

I truly believe the tablets and in particular the iPad are very well made for magazines, The concept behind this one in particular proves that.
I wonder how they will deliver them? No nothing about the size. If they prove to be heavy the 16GB iPad or for example the Adam with 5GB will be scarce to download such stuff.
EA
http://www.arsdigitalis.com.ar

Ok... This is my last post. I've asked now 3 times if it "can be done simply", post a link of an example. So far all you've posted is a tutorial on how to rotate a box of text, that's it.. Again, I would like to never have to use Flash again, but at this point HTML5 can't replace it for complex animation and media.

I posted examples of what can be done. I'm not going to do your dirty work there's a little thing called Google if you want more complex examples. You were trying to say that HTML5 and CSS3 can't do much of what you quoted and I was giving examples to disprove that. Google "@font-face" and "DIV rotation in HTML5" and whatever else you want. You may have to do some refining of your queries but that's normal. Here's a few more examples of what can be done with CSS and HTML5:

3D games: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/c...-html-5-can-1/

Custom Fonts: http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/

Using CSS on video: http://developer.apple.com/safari/li...CSSStyles.html

Web 3D (may need to download nightly build of Webkit): http://www.web3d.org/x3d/wiki/index....HTML5_examples

It's all there on the Internet.

Thing is that using SVG (Adobe's vector image format that they developed before purchasing Macromedia and using Flash), HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript you can do most of what you're asking and all of which are HTML standards meaning the browser can do the work instead of a poorly coded plugin.

Simple is subjective so if you're asking for a graphic editor that produces poor code like Dreamweaver and Flash then no there isn't any of that yet. That being said though with editors like Flux you can do all the layouts easily enough and add the CSS and Javascript with minimal effort.

There's no perfect way to do HTML5 but there are many ways to do it, there's only one way to do Flash content and that's not necessarily the best way. That being said using the W3C way of doing things means that most of the content will be viewable on all the latest browsers but one big holdout and we all know which one that is.

I'm not saying HTML5 is perfect but it has largely been called off now so is really down to fine tuning as opposed to adding more features. It is not some limited code that can't produce powerful applications because Apple has proved that wrong by using Sproutcore for MobileMe and iWork.com. The effects you can do with JQuery and Protocol which are Javascript libraries are amazing.

Yes you are going to have to learn knew things but a lot of what is being done in HTML5 just simply carries on from HTML4 with some additions and some deprecations so it doesn't take long to learn. CSS3 doesn't take much to learn either and is so much easier using stylesheets in order to reduce code use because it can be used over again rather than writing the same code in each page. One document that's called by all pages or two or three depending on what screens you're using using the "Media" tag.

As I say, simple is subjective but it's not difficult to code HTML by hand. It's like any language. That being said I'm sure Apple has something up their sleeves for iWork and iWeb so we only need to wait a month or two to find out.

Very sharply presented point.

That's a good point, but it's not just a proof of concept that I can tell, it's an article in a real "digital" magazine, I can't tell how long they've been made. That's a lot of money to put into something for it to just to be a proof of concept or an art school experiment, I think it's possible to do a proof of concept with much cheaper equipment and fewer people, Edison didn't have a 12 person audio production crew. There can be value to the techniques shown here, I think it was a poorly chosen example. It probably bought them a lot of exposure though, so maybe it paid off.

When it comes down to it, I don't think this is a new idea either, I'm pretty sure this is more like a revival of a technique with an updated style, more 3D & motion graphics. I remember seeing a few different CD-ROM magazines where you're given deluxe multimedia articles, you click certain things and it animates in a way relevant to the part in question. This was 15 years ago, so I don't even remember the names of any such magazines, I don't know if any such projects lasted more than a year, it was probably just too early. I think PC/Computing or a similar magazine had one such issue like that. I'll have to dig out my box of CD-ROMs some time.