The MAZ Blog

I’ll be on a panel called Multi-Platform Publishing for Mobile News and Magazine Content

Thanks to B.I. for this great write-up! Read it here

This app will allow readers to explore reading in an entirely new way. By giving readers access to a new, secret website that only they can gain access to through the portals in the app version of the book, readers can respond to questions, ask questions, write their own versions of sections of the story and share it with others among many other new ways of connecting, reader to reader and reader to writer. In addition, there are links within the app itself to a variety of informative sites, resources that give readers a deeper understanding of the context, times and content within the e-book.

The most creative use of the MAZ platform that I’ve seen to date.

There has been much sparring this week as comments and responses have come pouring in about this post by Jason Pontin at Technology Review.

I wrote a brief response when I first read it, and I have a lot of thoughts on these matters, many of which were so well-articulated in this post by Mike Hanley that they do not need to be re-written here. 

While the debate is healthy, sensationalist headlines about publishers (plural) disliking apps, based on ONE company, and ONE person’s experience, is not fair or right to all of the others who are making it work, but are perhaps less rambunctious about their successes. Jason’s frustration comes across loud and clear though, and I truly do feel for him and other publishers who feel scorned by their iPad app experience.

I am not going to pick a side re: Apps vs. HTML5 in the longterm. Anyone who claims to know the future of mobile and tablet publishing and consumption norms is just speculating. Every publisher should be thinking about betting on every possible horse they can. 

We do have some historical data from these early years of content on mobile and tablet devices, and if you look at consumer habits (which you should), there is a lot in support of apps.

81.5% of time spent with smartphones is with apps, 18.5% on the mobile web [source]. There are 250+ million iTunes users with credit cards on file that can easily make App Store and in-app purchases (as opposed to entering their credit cards into a mobile site). App content can be read offline. Apps just “feel” better as they are quite literally native to the device. And the list goes on… That is why MAZ has chosen to work exclusively with apps for the time being. 

But Apps vs. HMTL5 ultimately is the wrong debate to be having. Technology Review is making a serious mistake in their assessment because they are ignoring the real wrench that has been thrown at them (clue: it’s not apps).

Mobile and tablet devices themselves are the real disrupters, not apps. The experience of using these devices is so radically different than using a computer, perhaps as radically different as the computer was 20 years ago when compared with print.

Publishers’ worlds got turned upside down with the birth of the desktop web, and they have only recently gotten their website acts together, if at all.

Now once again, a huge change is rocking their boat. And longterm, it’s true that you won’t be able to just throw your print edition up on the iPad untouched, but you also can’t just throw up a new version of your website.

Tablet and mobile consumption is so so different than computer consumption. Flipboard’s CEO, Mike McCue, spoke recently about the beauty “revolution” of the iPad. All hail! The dark ages of web design are finally over! Viva la revolution!

For the beauty of the iPad, print is actually a much closer analogy than a website is. 

In the end, we need to be aiming to perfect the tablet consumption and production experience. It’s not print, and it’s not the web. It’s somewhere in the middle. I personally call it “digital print”. No one has it quite right yet, but how could they? The device itself has only existed for 2 years. 

All that being said, there is very much a place, now, in 2012, for tablet versions of print, AND tablet versions of websites. You have to start somewhere. There must be an entry point for publishers into this new market. You can’t just skip to the end. (and if you wait until then to start, you’ll be way too late)

Magazine publishers now have two products to worry about with tablets: their print edition and their website. How do you do it all?

TR writes about moving to a purely RSS-like model. I think that makes sense for a web team that is used to outputting to a website— used to templates, a CMS, and sacrificing branding to other RSS readers. The expectations of website consumers is met also: they can read what they want and/or read it through a nice RSS reader like Flipboard.

However for a team used to outputting to print, they need a solution that builds on their existing workflow, which is very different than a web team’s. These are editors and designers who greatly value the curation, presentation, and branding integrity of their content. And in turn, their readers have come to expect that experience. 

Newspapers have it the hardest. Their content is consumed more like a website’s, but they are used to print workflows. Tough spot to be in. 

Over time, these various sorts of publishers may all converge to a single mobile/tablet type of content provider. I believe there will in fact be a convergence at some point. It won’t be web, and it won’t be print— it will be something new. 

But you still need to start somewhere, and you need to start now. Don’t go bet the farm, just start. Get in the game. Choose a way that is frictionless and cost-effective, leaving room to grow as the market grows. 

Readership will only get more fragmented over time, not less. Think of apps and HTML5 “web apps” as two different platforms, just like iOS and Android are different platforms. That’s how the app/HTML5 conversation should be framed.

What you should be concentrating on instead is mastering the experience of tablet and mobile devices, and working with tools that allow you to explore and experiment.

Do you have any closing message for the future women leaders at the Indian School of Business?

Follow your dreams and don’t settle for anything less than what you’re worth.

Proud to have Shikha as our CTO. Read the whole interview here (starts on page 2).

I first read about this hoopla on The Pixel Peeps, then I saw it was picked up on Daring Fireball, now I’ve seen it on Mashable, Cult of Mac, Buzzfeed, and everywhere else from the industry-specific Publishing Business newsletter to the broader tech/media-y Jason Hirschhorn’s Media ReDEFined. I have had multiple people email me about this. The tech blog wormhole moves fast, and it is not kind.

As the founder of a startup that helps publishers create iPad magazines, I feel like all iPad magazines are getting a bad rep just because some high profile mags got caught with their pants down.

There are in fact someiPad magazines that look great on the new iPad. They were just not created with the Adobe Digital Publishing Platform.

Full disclosure, our CTO and Director of Mobile were both senior computer scientists at Adobe before coming to MAZ.  ;)

How Our Issues Were Retina-Ready From Day 1

The biggest magazine titles in the United States generally all use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (Condé Nast) or some derivation of it like Woodwing (Time Inc.). And so it is easy to generalize and declare that “all” magazines are not retina-ready. This is of course not the case.

MAZ has known for months, if not years, that retina screens would eventually come to the iPad. We planned accordingly way in advance, and that is why our magazine issues looked great from Day 1 on the new iPad.

It was because of a non-retina feature that we’ve had from the beginning that made this transition relatively painless: zooming. Many of our competitors are lacking this seemingly simple feature (all the Adobe apps for instance).

I am a firm believer that if you are reading on the iPad, you should be able to pinch, double-tap, and explore the page. Reading Wired on the iPad makes me feel like the app is broken; there is this disconnect between what my fingers think they can do and the imposed limitations. It’s like when you see a frustrated two year-old trying to tap a computer screen.

We included zooming in our apps from launch, even though we knew it would bring many challenges including file/storage size, memory management (something that developers need to worry about for mobile/tablet development in deciding how much “stuff” can be loaded into memory at any given time), scaling multimedia overlays, etc. “Feeling right” should be the #1 goal of any self-respecting software designer, and being able to pinch and zoom just feels right.

Because of this, all of our magazine pages are actually 1536px wide (768 x2), instead of the 768px width of the iPad and iPad 2 screen. 1536px crammed into 768px, so that when you zoom up to 200%, things still look purty.

Cut to the new iPad, and that’s exactly what needs to happen for retina: cram twice as many pixels in. (It’s actually 4 times as many, but twice as many in the width and twice as many in the height.)

As we heard rumors swirling that March was going to be iPad 3 time, we had many discussions about whether to extend our pages to be 3072px wide, essentially making them double-double, for retina. We decided to leave them as is so that we could make an informed decision after some real-world experience with the new iPad after its release. And we were comfortable doing this knowing that our magazine issues would already be retina-ready when viewed at 100%. We’re still evaluating the double-double scenario.

And so not only do our issues zoom, but they were retina-ready from Day 1 as you can see - these are some samples from the Inc. Magazine app, created using MAZ, on an iPad 2 (left) vs. the new iPad (right). Crisp!

Shipping Software Without Testing Is Bad Practice

First off, to all the nay-sayers that say all 60,000 iPads apps should have been 100% ready on the first day of the new iPad, let it be said that releasing a fully retina-ready app from Day 1 was highly risky, for anyone. Until you are holding the new iPad in your hands, doing proper quality assurance tests, you really can’t know 100% that it is going to look good.

This is the reason we did not ship apps with retina assets (buttons, icons, etc.) in advance, because we wanted to make sure we had it right. The issues were in good shape, so the rest could wait. You see if something is wrong in your app, you have to submit an update to be approved by Apple, and that can take weeks. I believe it’s better to properly test and be a couple of weeks late than have 3 million new iPad users opening your apps the first weekend and there being a problem and then those users need to wait weeks for the fix.

We are now submitting apps with an all-retina UI, after a week of actual new iPad testing - here is a screen shot of the improvement. Not vital for reading itself, but it sure does look way better. Look at the detail, even in the textures!

Bigger Is Not Better

The Mashable article over-simplifies a solution for Condé Nast (apparently quoting someone at Adobe) by saying that all a magazine has to do is export to a PDF and voila! Presto! Retina-ready!

What Vogue did — and what all other titles will have to do in the coming weeks — is begin exporting their digital editions as PDFs, said Koch.

There are so many problems with this. First off, rendering live PDFs in an app puts way more strain on the device and moves much slower than displaying images (which are already rendered). Secondly, PDFs are freaking huge.

Lastly, the mentality here is wrong. He talks about what they need to do, making the publishers shoulder the technological weight. I believe this is wrong. It should be the responsibility of the platforms to keep everyone up-to-date with the standards; that is one of the key advantages of using a platform vs. custom development in the first place!

A magazine that is around 400 megabytes on the new iPad will be around 280 megabytes on the iPad 1 and 2, Koch said.

How is either of those scenarios acceptable to anyone?! It’s embarrassing! 400 MB for a retina-ready version and 280 MB for a non-retina version. Neither is zoomable, for that you would need to double those numbers 800/560 MB. That is insane. Insane for download times, insane for storage space, and insane for memory management. Why do consumers and publishers put up with this nonsense?

Early on, we made file size and download speeds a huge priority at MAZ. We have a proprietary conversion engine that maximizes quality while minimizing file size that we are constantly improving to get files even smaller, looking even better, and downloading even faster. We also insist that all large multimedia be streaming which helps keeps things in check.

The first issue in the Inc. Magazine app, created with MAZ, (retina-ready and zoomable, mind you) is a 62.6 MB download. That’s 116 pages of high quality, beautiful, pixel-perfect magazine layout, clocking in at 15% the size of Vogue’s 400 MB. That’s an 85% faster download too.

Big Companies Move Slow

Time Inc.’s titles (Time, Sports Illustrated, People), created with Woodwing via Adobe DPS, are still not in the iOS Newsstand, which came out in October 2011 and was announced in June 2011, almost a year ago.

Memar, an Iranian architecture magazine that created its iPad app with MAZ, is on the Newsstand. MAZ had all our apps Newsstand-ready almost immediately.

Don’t you think Time Magazine has more resources available to it than Memar Magazine? So what’s going on here?

The only thing slower than one giant corporation is two giant corporations.

At a startup like MAZ, we are able to be fast and nimble and implement changes constantly. We live and breathe only this, only digital magazines; it is our sole focus. So we’re ready and able to keep up with the times at a moment’s notice. I, the CEO, decided we needed retina assets, and so I, also the UI designer, sat down and made them. I sent them to our dev team, and they sent me a working app to test within hours. That’s startup speed.

Obviously I’m biased, but I believe large corporations like Time Inc. and Condé Nast should work with small, agile companies when it comes to new technology, as behemoths like Adobe only further the cycle of complacency.

The Tech Elite Don’t Understand Magazine Publishers

Disclaimer: I love most of what John Gruber writes/says, but sometimes he and and others over-simplify things.

In the latest episode of his podcast, The Talk Show, Gruber says of image-based magazine apps, “I have no other word for it other than stupid,” and proceeds to say how stupid it is for a while. “It’s the stupidest way ever to do a magazine.”

In the case of The New Yorker having 600 MB (non-zoomable, non-retina) issue downloads, which he mostly refers to, it’s hard not to agree.

But I think he and many others overlook the realities of publishing a magazine to the iPad. Magazines are created by highly creative teams of writers, editor, photographers, and layout designers. They work side-by-side with marketing and sales teams and advertisers. These are not tech people. Nor should they need to be. The technological tools made available to publishers must be aimed at these existing teams. Making the apps look and feel like the magazine is essential, and to do that, the same people have to be creating both.

Layout design is exactly what separates a magazine from the web. It’s not an afterthought, it is the essence of the magazine experience. On the web, we describe content as just words and images, but content has a 3rd dimension, presentation, and that is what magazine publishers are trying to bring to the iPad. You can’t ignore that or else it’s just not a magazine any more.

And so far, pixel-perfect images or PDFs are the best way to capture that on the iPad.

It’s easy for an outsider to say, “Oh well you should just do it a different way,” but that’s the culture of a magazine. I work with publishers every day, and in another life I was a magazine designer myself, and for iPad magazine apps, the tools must suit the design first and foremost.

Will these technologies change and evolve over time? Absolutely. Will image-based or PDF-based iPad magazine rule supreme forever? No. MAZ is already working on tools for the future, as are our competitors I’m sure. But it’s a process. An entire industry can’t turn on a dime. At least not without some help, which is exactly what we’re here to do.

Existing MAZ Publishers - Your issues (including back issues) are all retina-ready, and the entire retina UI will be coming as an app update soon. We will contact you if we need any new branding assets from you.

Publishers Looking For Apps - If you want a retina-optimized app, check out MagAppZine powered by MAZ, we are shipping all new magazine apps retina-ready from the get-go.

Techies- some great posts re: designing for retina:
Designing for iPhone 4 Retina Display: Techniques and Workflow
Designing for Retina display
Designing for Retina display, part two