The iPad edition of the magazine was originally made in a beta version of Flash CS5, relying on its ability to output iPhone OS apps. When Apple banned third-party runtimes, Adobe built Wired this horrifying hack. I think it's an InDesign plugin. The idea is that Wired's designers won't have to learn anything about the iPhone OS to create the app, but this is a pretty atrocious implementation.
No inside knowledge or anything like that, just from the description in the article above of what they're doing internally. Converting each page of the layout into two JPEGs, one for portrait and one for landscape. That's really wasteful and destructive, they're ruining the usability of text and turning their paid app into an inferior product compared to their website.
