Last chance to save on Digiday Publishing Summit passes is February 9
Khoi Vinh, former design director at NYTimes.com, has been a vocal critic of magazine publisher efforts on the iPad. One of his main criticisms: they’ve built far more complicated apps than necessary. Vinh writes on his blog Subtraction.com that maybe publishers aren’t so bad at least when compared to art galleries. He takes to task the new iPad app for one of his favorite museums, the Gagosian Gallery. For a diehard fan like Vinh, the app failed to deliver and left him befuddled.
[I[t’s all so intricate and fancy and unnecessarily complicated that it blows right past a great opportunity to engage people, like me, who want to consume art easily, effortlessly and on my own terms, without the hassle of deciphering an obstructive interface. The iPad is a fantastic platform for art in a way that no computing technology that came before it really was — I really feel strongly about this — but this app is not realizing the potential of the platform. That makes me sad.
More in Media
In Graphic Detail: The scale of the challenge facing publishers, politicians eager to damage Google’s adland dominance
Last year was a blowout ad revenue year for Google, despite challenges from several quarters.
Why Walmart is basically a tech company now
The retail giant joined the Nasdaq exchange, also home to technology companies like Amazon, in December.
The Athletic invests in live blogs, video to insulate sports coverage from AI scraping
As the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics collide, The Athletic is leaning into live blogs and video to keeps fans locked in, and AI bots at bay.