Deconstruction of the Wired iPad App

Speaking of the Wired iPad app, Layton Duncan has a good analysis of how it’s built:

At its core the app is a simple XML driven layout engine. Content is split into “stacks”, each horizontal swipe in the app loads a new stack. Each stack has associated meta data such as title, description, tags etc. Each stack has an ordered list of “assets” which are essentially 1024 × 768 pixel static images of the pages which are displayed while browsing.

That explains why text isn’t selectable. (I wonder if they could switch to PDF for the stacks?)

★ Tuesday, 1 June 2010