ITWeekly announced the shift to online-only publishing sometime ago. My picture of the shift was having ITWeekly in a better web-based form; easier to read, bookmark, search, and most of the interactivity through user interaction with content not with the interface. The all new ITWeekly is a fully flashed up app with all interactive pages that could be turned and zoomed. Neat! But…
It is in the first versions, perhaps beta or testing versions, so we’re not gonna’ talk about glitches or any kind of shortcomings. I’m so concerned with their interface and the whole interactivity of the online magazine.
As their press release stated, they want to bring the paper magazine experience to digital form–fliping pages and having issues instead of categories/sections. They also stated that since most of the readers are IT-savvy readers, a unique digital experience was a must. While I’m diging the cool video player floating on a page and having fun using(not reading) the online magazine, I’m so turned off with the archive-suitable kind of view of the magazine.
It’s usable? Perhaps? But not readable
Some questions that poped up during fliping the pages are:
- How fast text inside the flashy pages are going to take to get indexed?
- Bandwidth usage?
- Text version at all?
- Mobile-Enabled?
- Feeds? (it’s gonna’ be emailed to users every week, no cool)
- Keyboard navigation and scrolling
- Linking to an article and URLs
After a long thought, I don’t see any improvement in ITWeekly’s publishing workflow, that is, the same print-layout and even the same sections and content style, but with a video instead of photos. As I looked at it closer, it became an interactive version of a PDF reader.
My take, I want the web-style back, I want to be able to scroll with my mouse wheel and select text, add links to my del.icio.us and have a lot of white space and not to have to drag pages.
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