AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge
Are native apps the future for print magazines? Not according to the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, Jason Pontin. His piece on the publication’s switch from a native iPad app to HTML5 web development will make uncomfortable reading for many fellow publishers, and possibly also Apple. Check the zingers: “The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, ‘walled gardens,’ and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens,” he writes. “We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.” Oh, and: “The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.”

Are native apps the future for print magazines? Not according to the editor-in-chief and publisher of MIT’s Technology Review, Jason Pontin.

His piece on the publication’s switch from a native iPad app to HTML5 web development will make uncomfortable reading for many fellow publishers, and possibly also Apple.

Check the zingers: “The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, ‘walled gardens,’ and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens,” he writes.

“We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.”

Oh, and: “The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.”