Gartner projects the iPad’s commanding 84% share of the worldwide tablet segment in 2010 will fall by nearly half over the next five years to 47%, mainly as a result of Android eating into Apple’s lead. The Google platform will more than double its share over the same period from about 14% to 39%.

“Volume will be driven by support from many players, the ecosystem of applications for tablets getting more competitive, and some platform flexibility allowing lower price points,” states Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner.

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Adobe just took the wraps off the long-awaited Digital Publishing Suite that powers the Wired magazine and The New Yorker iPad apps. With InDesign CS5 at the core, you can now author your layouts, including interactive content, and export it out in the new .issue format.

1 CREATE A NEW WEB DOCUMENT
From there you can preview your content on the iPad using the free Adobe Digital Content Preview Tool. If you want to monetize your content then you could check Adobe’s hosted solutions. For the purpose of this tutorial, however, we’ll walk you through the steps to build your digital issue. In order to do this tutorial you’ll need to download and install the Digital Publishing Suite components from http://labs.adobe.com. Since we’re targeting the iPad, we need to create a document that’s the right size. Go to the File>New>Document menu and choose Web for the Intent, 1024×768 for Page Size, and click the Portrait icon for Orientation.

2 CREATE YOUR COVER
Typically, we design longer documents in multiple InDesign files for ease of collaboration, and we’re going to follow that same procedure here even if we’re the only ones laying out this publication. Each section or article of your digital publication is called a stack, and each stack is a separate InDesign document. Our first stack will be the cover. You can design the cover anyway that you like using standard InDesign techniques for image placement and fonts. Save it with whatever name you want but make sure the name ends in “_v.indd” (e.g., “cover_v.indd”).

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The latest new vendor hoping to power publishers’ tablet magazines has one of the slickest systems so far. As we revealed last month, Bonnier has spun out its Mag+ concept, which is used by Popular Science‘s iPad edition, for commercialization by a separate business, Moving Media+.

From today, that business is offering the software framework for download by publishers. CEO Staffan Ekholm told me recently the strategy is to release the software as a free download, so publishers can test it and build editions without committing outlay. Moving Media+ will, however, charge both a flat and a per-title fee to magazines that go ahead and distribute editions to consumers.

Ekholm said Mag+ is currently used by about 25 titles, including IDG’s MacWorld in Sweden.

Mag+ was worked up by global seven teams created by Bonnier over eight months in 2009, Ekholm told me. London design house BERG was the lead creative agency for what was then just a concept, but the software was actually realized. The pitch is that this is a production tool developed by publishers for publishers.

Digital Publishing Suite includes hosted enterprise-level tools for building and testing content, distributing content for multiple mobile platforms, analytics tools and support for Adobe SiteCatalyst, e-commerce support, and the ability upload new content via Folio Producer directly from Adobe InDesign.

Adobe has also committed to supporting Apple’s new in-app subscription feature, along with Google’s One Pass subscription service.

Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines’ iPad editions than publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a growing effort to figure out tablet computers.
“We thought that of course there’s a lot of activity going on on an iPad, when there’s so many things you can be doing — between email, Netflix, playing games, reading magazines — but they’re actually bouncing around a lot more than we thought,” said Megan Miller, research and development program director at Bonnier, which publishes titles including Popular Science, Field & Stream, Parenting and Ski.

“If you sit someone down with a magazine, within seconds they’re researching the products that they could buy,” Ms. Miller said. “If they see a snowboard in a snowboarding magazine, they’ll bounce over to Amazon to check the prices on it.”
The study, from Bonnier and ad agency CP&B, reflects findings from 15 focus groups in three cities that were designed to include heavy print magazine readers, heavy iPad users and heavy consumers of magazine content on the web. Next Bonnier and CP&B will try to apply the results to developing new ad formats for tablets. A pilot series of these ads will appear in the Popular Science iPad app late this spring.
It’s already apparent that the study has implications for magazines. Publishers have been telling advertisers that their iPad editions combine print’s ability to engross readers with digital media’s interactivity. The way publishers have been building their apps, however, now seems to have given interactivity the upper hand.
That might be a good thing. People want to use digital magazines as “exploration springboards” and don’t like content that seems like a dead end, the study found. And marketers will obviously be happy if iPad editions trigger a lot of shopping. But it also implies that publishers need to think about their goals for the iPad edition and how to get readers back once they’ve bounced off to Amazon or elsewhere.  Read entire story.

Have you ever created a Genius playlist on iTunes or set up a station on Pandora? Just plug in one song, and you instantly hear music that matches your tastes. Think of Zite, the free personalized iPad magazine that launched today, as the Genius playlist or Pandora of news discovery–but with one noticeable advantage: Zite is smarter, at least for now.
Developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, the technology behind Zite can learn your reading habits and personalize content based on your interests.

When first opening the app, Zite will immediately begin personalizing your experience. Link a Twitter account or Google Reader, and Zite will analyze (not simply display) your feeds to create a magazine tailored to your interests. You might get sources you know, you might get content you want from sources you don’t know. (And yes, you’ll occasionally get stories you have no interest in–just tell Zite and it catches on pretty quickly.) After adding my Twitter handle @austincarr, for example, Zite learned my tastes and created relevant sections–entrepreneurship, gadgets, social media. It then culled news items from fitting sources–Fast Company, Wired, TechCrunch, Fred Wilson’s blog.   Read the entire story:

The notion that the iPad was going to save newspapers and magazines had been diminishing somewhat lately, especially since publishers have tended to regard Apple’s 70/30 revenue split for digital subscriptions coupled. Not to mention Apple’s continued refusal to share substantive consumer data. But with iPad 2 coming Friday, publishers’ ardor for the hot device appears to be growing again. Speaking at the Bloomberg Media Summit, Hearst Magazines President David Carey seemed to take the hurdles Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has thrown in publishers’ paths in stride, suggesting the Hearst might consider introducing a “bespoke” iPad publication akin to what News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). did with The Daily.

Over the next five years or so, Carey told Bloomberg reporter Brett Pulley that tablets could comprise 25- to 30 percent of magazines’ circulation. He expressed confidence that as the tablet market grows, both in terms of audience and devices, Apple’s stance could ultimately loosen. Either way, he pointed to the “digital storefront” that Next Issue Media has been working on the past year as one of several options that will allow media companies to take fuller advantage of the possibilities presented by tablets.

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Wired has arrived in the tablet age.

The magazine of all things geek chic is now available on the iPad, with an application that allows users to read, rotate and watch all of the contents from the print edition.

And executives at Condé Nast, which owns the magazine, are not shy about how they view the implications: “This is the beginning of a revolution,” said Tom Wallace, the editorial director of Condé Nast.

The June issue, which features “Toy Story 3” characters on its cover, sells for $4.99, the print version’s cover price. Readers will be offered a number of multimedia enhancements, including extra photos, videos, audio and interactive graphics.

A Lamborghini Gallardos made of Legos, for example, which has six images in the print magazine, is shown being constructed in the app through a slide show of 180 images that a user can scroll through like a flip-book. The two images of Mars that ran in the print version become a rotating 3-D version on the app.

“All the tools of modern storytelling are wrapped up into this,” said Scott Dadich, the magazine’s creative director.

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Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: Two news applications, a social network and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” even before we knew whether the iPad was real. The question Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new? has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office. Read more.

We’ve seen iPads and cats go viral. We’ve seen iPads and dogs go viral. But the latest iPad YouTubesensation is far more special: it depicts how the device has changed one 99-year-old woman’s life.

99-year-old Virgina Cambell of Lake Oswego, Oregon is an avid reader, according to The Oregonian. Unfortunately she has glaucoma, which affects her vision and makes it difficult for her to read books.

Her solution? The iPad, which is her first computer according to the now-viral video depicting her with the device. Its ability to change fonts and increase screen brightness has given her the ability to read again. It has “changed her life,” according to one of her daughters.

She’s even used the device’s virtual keyvboard to write limericks, like this one about her new Apple tablet:

To this technology-ninny it’s clear
In my compromised 100th year,
That to read and to write
Are again within sight
Of this Apple iPad pioneer.

Apple has to be loving this type of free advertising for its newest product. With more stories like this one popping up every day, it’s no wonder Apple can’t keep up with iPad demand.