The iPad was meant to be this amazing second coming for the world of magazines — a perfectly sized device with a beautiful screen, screaming for quality content. Unfortunately, magazine publishers dropped the ball, releasing apps where issues were hundreds of megs in size, and pages just enormous images of text. It looks like an update to the New Yorker app may finally show that some of the major publishers have figured out how to do things right.
The New Yorker app is now available on the iPhone where it was iPad only before, which is swell I guess, but the really interesting stuff is how Condé Nast adapted the content for the smaller screen size. According to AllThingsD, the published platform they constructed with Adobe can now export text as “paginated HTML,” rather than just enormous images.
That means that your files are text — which means you can potentially copy and paste excerpts, search for specific phrases, and all sorts of other fun things.
It also means the individual issues are much smaller: this week’s is just 23MB on the iPhone compared to 100MB on the iPad.
Smaller downloads and better text integration? Sounds like Condé Nast is getting close to releasing magazine apps that aren’t horrible. Now this just needs to happen for all their other titles, too.
[app url="http://itunes.apple.com/app/the-new-yorker-magazine/id370614765?mt=8"]
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