Where for art thou PDF?
Condé Nast’s iPad magazines are really fat. And for the same reason why Apple doesn’t like Flash: their apps don’t efficiently use the iPad’s native implementations. Here, the issue is text and image rendering. With Flash, the main issue is H.264.
each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by “a bunch of images” I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB.
[Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?]
for the moment, Adobe doesn’t have the ability to break up HTML text into individual pages
[Condé Nast’s iPad Apps Are Too Portly. Blame Adobe.]
Condé Nast relies on Adobe’s Digital Viewer, which was released just after Apple’s infamous ban on third-party development frameworks. Adobe had to custom-build the Objective-C code.
Why don’t they use PDF’s? I mean, it’s coming from Adobe! CS5 could export PDF’s, preserve vector graphics and text to reduce the file size. Then the app could present them in the unique layout.
Is there any technical limitation that prevents iOS from doing this with PDF’s?
My best guess is that Adobe is afraid to rely on Quartz’s PDF rendering. They’ve been planning this as a cross-platform digital reader, and WebKit rendering will be more consistent.
