I’d missed this first time around: Oliver Reichenstein wrote a thorough, in-depth analysis of the typographic problems with the WIRED iPad app:

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (“interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.

He makes some really potent points about the differences between designing readable publications for print and screen: the folly of column layouts, careful use of gutters, the impact of too much ornamentation. He presents some very subtle examples, but that is the strength of his reasoning: it’s the subtleties of designing for different digital devices which are most important; the devil is, indeed, in the details. Porting a print design directly to digital reading devices like the iPad isn’t good enough.

We should use original tools to create iPad apps, not because Steve Jobs said so, but because these tools create products with flesh and bone, that is: an understanding of both the purpose, the potential and the limits of the iPad technology.