Publishers shouldn't be app developers
37signals.com
37signals.com
Take the Newegg app, for instance. It is literally a mobile site served up in PhoneGap. They could just make that their default stylesheet for mobile web and it would both perform better and be a better experience for their users, who now don't have to download yet another app to use a website they'll visit once or twice a year.
For the Newegg app they do have barcode scanning built in (Android version) which isn't possible as a website.
radio - commercials, tv - commercials, mail - spam, e-mail - spam, phone - cold calling, text - spam, web - banners, social media - ads, apps - useless apps,
All of these channels have been abused by companies until channel gets too inefficient, costly, or regulated.
The Apple native app ecosystem is the equivalent of AOL in the mid-90s. It doesn't play well with the one feature that made the web so immensely valuable.
It's sad and it's wrong for the user's experience but we just have to do this. If we don't have our mobile apps, advertisers will give their money to competitors.
I won't send a link to our crappy apps, they are too crappy indeed.
I think The Magazine is awesome on a number of levels, but it also comes from a certain viewpoint, one that most traditional publishers cannot embrace without breaking the way they currently do business. Marco has been able to do build himself a new platform with essentially no constraints (aside from his upfront time & money investment obviously), utilising a new business model, a luxury print publishers may not have. He has also been able to build himself the infrastructure required to complete this, this is not expertise most publishing houses have, and he's publishing in HTML, a lot of publishers don't have the tools or expertise to produce HTML content to the quality they're looking for.
The big opportunity here is for publishers to embrace this new medium wholeheartedly, not with their traditional mags/brands, but with new ones built specifically for digital. In my view, publishers & other "traditional" content owners should be funding skunkworks projects that cannibalise their own market before someone else does (something Apple continues to do for example).
A dual pronged approach where they continue to leverage their existing brands, mags, etc. but branch out into newer markets & business models by repurposeing & utilising their existing content is a win-win scenario.
As commented on that other post: I recently researched tools that are designed to help people make book or magazine apps (mobile apps). There are many options. I decided to share my findings here:
http://www.mobilechameleon.com/toolkits-to-develop-magazine-...
So what he really is complaining about is Adobe's shitty platform. Good luck getting old paper to change their current workflows.
I work on and maintain a few non-magazine apps for a very large publisher and it's a very laborious approval process that moves at a snails pace. Thank god for day rates and retainerships.
A magazine-porting framework for iOS and Android would rock. Sales would be tough, though--you'd probably have to partner closely with Conde Nast or another big publisher for v1.0, and...well, good luck with that.
It's not perfect yet but we have a great roadmap and hope to have all the major features publishers need in the near future.
The result works on every browser. Savory hosts content for publishers, and provides design themes. See http://chainamag.com for a working site. Savory has a great CMS based on Locomotive.
The most robust Treesaver publication is Sporting News, http://tablet.sportingnews.com, which is designed primarily as an iPad app available through the Apple Newsstand. This magazine gets as big as 1,500 pages (iPad size) daily—with a 5:00 pm update! All this is done with no more staff than a typical web site. The web edition enables readers to share content with anyone with a browser and a connection to the net.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/time-out-new-york-for-ipad/i...
So what's the deal with the horrible magazine one?
I'm not affiliated with them, but they fixed exactly what this article complains about with my one friend's publishing service.
Their iOS app is custom-branded, but still Qmags-powered.
I wonder why more publishers don't go this route...
Table of contents? PDFs have that.
Navigation? PDFs have that.
Metadata? Oh for the love of pete, PDFs have that.
Qmag adds nothing to the experience and the client is slow and annoying.
Agreed that theres a ton of wasted effort in this space. Something along the lines of apples Newsstand has so much pitential.