HTML5 Aside Magazine

One of the things that you frequently get from the naysayers or the Apple haters, is that the iPad will not play flash. I have been using the iPad for over a year now and have never needed flash to be able to do what I need to do using the device. Adobe have recently stated that they will no longer support or go forward with their mobile flash product. Although they are late to the party, it seems that they finally agreed that Flash is too processor intensive and greedy to properly run well on mobile devices. There have been one or two applications which have tried to get flash to run in some strange hacked sort of fashion, but I don’t think they have been too successful. The sort of iPad Flash app are few and far between and I don’t think they are really worth bothering with. So, do you really need iPad 2 Flash support?

HTML 5 is the future although Flash will persist

There will be many websites that will continue to have Flash on them. This will be because of inertia by some web designers to move from something that they know already and also there will be websites that just don’t get upgraded to HTML 5. On the other hand, HTML 5 is the standard that has been agreed and forward-looking web designers will prefer to use a standard that will give a better user experience to the website readers. Many websites are already changing to HTML 5 and there are a number of excellent examples of HTML 5 media such as the HTML 5 Aside magazine. The Aside magazine created by a German group of designers showed what can be done creatively with HTML 5.

HTML5 Aside Magazine Creativity

Within the magazine you have audio, video, animation and even 3-D animation design elements. You get a certain amount of user interactivity, for instance if you touch one of a group of photos, it will animate to zoom up to the front of the pile. There are buttons that you can touch that cause a photo and text to change, also using animation to move from one state to another. Aside HTML 5 magazine is really impressive looking and an enjoyable experience for the reader. The only thing I would say is, is that if you don’t know that there are animations they’re available, you might not click or tap on the part of the design that make things happen.

Navigation through the HTML 5 Aside web magazine

As you would expect with any webpage you will find that there are hotlinks that will take you from one page to another as well as on page buttons that will cause things to happen on that page. You might clicl on a button for instance, and the image on the page will change along with the text to go with it. When viewing the magazine on the iPad, you can do the usual swipe gesture to move from one page to the next.

Creating your own HTML 5 webpages

Already there are plenty of places online where you can find information about how to use HTML 5 and there are also applications available such as the application called Hype. I have also recently tried an application called Motion Composer, which is also a Mac app. Hype is an application which is totally HTML 5 and is a WYSIWYG way of creating HTML 5 animations for a webpage. You can use the Hype application like a desktop publishing app or Pages for iPad, but with a timeline, to manipulate the elements that you wish to include in your webpage. Using the page that you create for yourself on a web site is really easy. You just put two lines of code on your webpage and upload a folder that the code refers to.

Using HTML 5 to predict the of the world

There is a book that you can buy from the iTunes iOS application store which is by Al Gore which also extensively uses HTML 5. It has some superb animations and interactivity built into it and is certainly even more impressive than the Aside HTML 5 magazine. The company that produced the software that was used to create the Al Gore book, was called Push Pop Press. It would have been great if that software had been made available to all web designers to buy, but it is now unlikely that will happen as the company was bought by another larger company, possibly Facebook. We will have to wait to see if Push Pop Press is developed further and is made available to use to create more content like the Al Gore ‘Our Choice’ digital book.

Can we expect to see more like the HTML 5 Aside magazine?

The Aside magazine was constructed with the iPad specifically in mind. It was set to the iPad screen dimensions of 1024 x 768 pixels and worked as a webpage within the application. It might have worked a little better in terms of speed of download, if all of the content had been downloaded with the application. We are seeing this approach happening more often, such as with the SCO tutor for Lion by Don McAllister in which the videos are downloaded to the iPad. The same happens also with the new application by Sting the musician and 450 MB of content downloads as part of the application.

Print magazines are looking to use this technology to be able to disseminate their content and have it better looking and more interactive at the same time. It also gets around the need to have the application sold through the Apple ecosystem, when the magazine is presented like the Aside HTML 5 magazine has been.

HTML5 Aside Magazine

You don’t need flash for iPad or flash for iPad 2 to get the best out of an iPad html5 magazine. Steve Jobs was right about flash support for iPad 2 and the original iPad, the html5 Aside Magazine proves that iPad flash support would have been a big mistake.