TwitterJeffrey Zeldman compares the trend for creating novelty interfaces in publication apps to the bad old days when Flash spawned a million bad interface designs. He also succinctly picks up on an important point as to why web standards are so important:
Everything we’ve learned in the past decade about preferring open standards to proprietary platforms and user-focused interfaces to masturbatory ones is forgotten as designers and publishers once again scramble to create novelty interfaces no one but them cares about.
While some of this will lead to useful innovation, particularly in the area of gestural interfaces, that same innovation can just as readily be accomplished on websites built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—and the advantage of creating websites instead of iPad apps is that websites work for everyone, on browsers and devices at all price points. That, after all, is the point of the web. It’s the point of web standards and progressive enhancement.
There’s also some really good discussion to be found in the comments. But Zeldman nails the case for why this kind of stuff makes bad business sense for magazine publishers:
Unless your organization’s business model includes turning a profit by hiring redundant, competing teams, “Write once, publish everywhere” makes more economic sense than “Write once, publish to iPad. Write again, publish to Kindle. Write again, publish to some other device.”