TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Moonbot Studios is the group that built the inventive and beautiful “Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” iPad app/interactive book, and the Atlantic has wonderful profile of the group:

A color image of the cityscape shows up on screen with a triangle of pale blue sky at the top left of the image. Everyone ooohs. Ellis immediately starts noting its flaws. “This is just me playing around with color,” she says. “I wanted to play with the buildings. So, yeah, it’s not done. Eventually there will be Numberlies and letters.”

Joyce, sitting down near her, starts to imagine a different blue in the sky. He sounds as if he’s talking from a long way away. “What if that blue in the sky was really old Technicolor?” Joyce says. “That crazy fucking Technicolor blue. You saw some of it in A Star is Born. You can have it drop off, but have the really crazy blue in there.” His laser pointer flashes to the spot of sky. “Do that Star Is Born Blue.”

They’re using the iPad to build an altogether new medium for storytelling and are making beautiful artwork. I’m skeptical about integrating game-like elements into text and animation-based stories, but there’s huge potential with combining text and animation into a cohesive whole to tell a story. (And, more importantly, I’m not really the target demographic for these “books”—kids are—and they seem to love it.) I’m just excited to see a group creating a truly new way to tell stories, and by all accounts, making some great stories.

What’s interesting, too, is this kind of stuff shows the limits of the App Store for selling “applications” and iOS’s round-rectangle icon for managing them. Should “applications” like this really be sold the same way as, say, a Twitter app, and accessed the same way on iOS devices, too? I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel right. It feels almost like it’s devaluing this application by representing it the same way as any other, because it’s something else entirely. It’s a new kind of media, and should be treated as such.

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