Khoi Vinh, former design director at NYTimes.com, has been a vocal critic of magazine publisher efforts on the iPad. One of his main criticisms: they’ve built far more complicated apps than necessary. Vinh writes on his blog Subtraction.com that maybe publishers aren’t so bad at least when compared to art galleries. He takes to task the new iPad app for one of his favorite museums, the Gagosian Gallery. For a diehard fan like Vinh, the app failed to deliver and left him befuddled.
[I[t’s all so intricate and fancy and unnecessarily complicated that it blows right past a great opportunity to engage people, like me, who want to consume art easily, effortlessly and on my own terms, without the hassle of deciphering an obstructive interface. The iPad is a fantastic platform for art in a way that no computing technology that came before it really was — I really feel strongly about this — but this app is not realizing the potential of the platform. That makes me sad.
More in Media

YouTube is under fire again, this time over child protection
Adalytics Research asks, ‘Are YouTube advertisers inadvertently harvesting data from millions of children?’

Media Briefing: Publishers pump up per-subscriber revenue amid ad revenue declines
Publishers’ Q2 earnings reveal digital advertising is still in a tight spot, but digital subscriptions are picking up steam.

Lessons for AI from the ad-tech era: ‘We’re living in a memory-less world’
Experts reflect how the failures of social media and online advertising can help the industry improve the next era of innovation.
Ad position: web_bfu