I Publish Architecture & Design

Just found today in Talking New Media that Arquitetura & Construção launched their title for the iPad using the Woodwing platform. Being an architect and developing myself a title for the iPad, I downloaded the App and made a test run…

First of all, the contents were a positive surprise. I stopped reading Arquitectura & Construção (their portuguese sibling from Grupo Impresa) because I disliked their approach to architectural contents and lack of editorial criteria — this is something common to Brazilian architecture magazines as Projeto and AU — but I was amazed to see interesting articles such as the one about Container Houses or the one about Marina Acayaba and Juan Pablo Rosenberg.

About the application itself, I can say it is what we can expect from the Woodwing platform. I’m no fan of their App UI which I see as a reminiscence of the the 80s CD Rom — ugly and dated — but it gets the job done.

Obviously the biggest problem that all these magazines face when porting their titles from print to the iPad is that it leads to an almost replica of the paper content, using interactive stuff like this annoying scrolling text inside mini-boxes and multi-state objects to show different content, trying to mimic web interactivity to the new media.

I don’t agree with Pedro Monteiro (from the portuguese group that owns the same title) when he says this ”specific app was well done, focusing in on the content”. I don’t think this app is well done but it is what we expect from a corporation such as Abril group, but I completely agree with him and with Talking New Media on another thought that “without the burden of having to translate print pages for the iPad, new ideas that are native to the tablet could be created” and this leave us with a great question:

Why the big corporations don’t learn from software developers and stop trying to replicate their print titles into the tablets, and start exploring this new media with revolutionary titles?