★★★★☆

The interactive timeline of Mars missions is pretty nifty.

Congratulations to Wired for making it exciting to read a magazine again. The page design is beautiful and the interactives are thrilling. This is not a mere port of the print edition but a fully optimized iPad experience.

I hope Chris Anderson means it when he writes that the magazine is willing to experiment, especially when it comes to pricing. I find it funny that so many people are criticizing Wired for the price — “I’m not going to spend $5 an issue!” — even though the magazine has not said how much future issues will cost. I would gladly pay $5, hell, even $10, for an INITIAL download of the magazine. Then I would like the option to buy issues a la carte ($1.99?) or by subscription ($25/year?). This is no different from the newsstand vs. home delivery model. Of course Wired would upcharge for one-off purchases. And by the way, I think it’s OK to pay (a bit) more for the digital edition because I get so much more content than in the print edition.

Regardless of the pricing model, I would suggest Wired sell the app as a “container” app rather than a per-issue download. In other words, deliver a small app akin to Apple’s iBookstore that I can download quickly on a 3G connection (seriously, guys, that half-gigabyte download upfront is ridiculous) and then let me browse and download (and schedule downloads) of individual issues.

Pricing aside, the magazine is gorgeous on iPad. The UI is mostly intuitive, although for awhile I did not realize you could swipe DOWN to read more of an article — I thought I could only swipe left and right, page to page. In some places the copy suggests it; in other places the graphics design does. The UI should make this functionality clear in all cases without putting the burden on writers and designers to say “scroll down!”

Also, and this is a big one, please allow copy and paste. And no gimmicky restrictive stuff. Real copy and paste. Stop working against the user. If I want to excerpt a Wired article on my blog, I’ll find a way. I’m not going to steal your whole magazine. Seriously.

Also, there’s gotta be a Back button. Hyperlinking among articles is a wonderful feature that the print edition obviously can’t deliver. But if I can’t go back to where I just was, it’s disconcerting.

Finally, a bug: I’m not able to play any videos in ads. The video appears to be loaded, but hitting Play does nothing. Seems like a pretty important one to fix.

Onward!