≈ Relations

Steve Yelvington’s blog and twitter stream @yelvington are a must read in my daily inbox.  His latest post called: Algorithmic layout: Another thing the visual journalists are going to hate is a must read. Here’S (a little bit more than) the gist of it:

Print designers want total control over arbitrary layout. The makers of tools for print designers — especially Adobe — will be trying to cram their toolkit into digital bottles. Adobe’s plan for the iPad was to use InDesign for page layout, generating Flash components that would be compiled into a downloadable app. Now that Apple has killed Flash on the iPad, magazine designers are making iPad “applications” that are really collections of giant JPG files generated by print tools.

Image files! No wonder the apps are so huge. It’s like a flashback to the mid-1990s, when the New York Times homepage on the Web was one big GIF file.

Here’s my prediction: Algorithmic layout is going to win. The economics are brutal and they will decide.

We already have Gannett moving its newspaper layout work to central “Production Centers” — hospices for print. My friends in the visual journalism community hate hate hate this. I understand why. I laid out newspaper pages for years. Decoupling product construction from reporting and editing the news is not something to celebrate. But I also understand the economic drivers behind it.

The entities formerly known as newsrooms — Gannett calls them “Information Centers” — will oddly enough be more closely coupled to their websites than their print products. Their world will be inverted. They will be paying more attention to metadata — classification, tagging, geocoding, the elements of the semantic Web.

When you do this right, you create the conditions necessary for efficient algorithmic construction of a broad set of products tailored for specific situations. Web pages. Apps for the iPad. Mobile services. Microzoned products, defined by geography or interest or the user’s current status, delivered via electronic or even print processes, but “finished” with fairly little human involvement in the “pages” that are consumed

I very much agree with Steve, that at least for non-print products and escpecially tablets,  algorithmic layout will win. Here is (a slightly edited version) the comment i posted on his blog:

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IMHO algorithmic “layout” already has won in web and mobile. It’s the only way to produce that content in an economically feasible fashion for a multitude of devices and screen sizes. Ok, it’s discussable if the placement of boxes in a mostly linear fashion deserves to be called layout

More advanced algorihmic layout using constraint-based layout techniques to place content on a 2d grid  is  used in  directories, most yellow pages and catalogues.

The publishers desire to have a newspaper like rendition of the content on  tablets like the ipad (not sure if this also the readers desire)  can IMHO only be solved with algorithmic layout.   National/global monthly, and may be weekly magazines can be manually relayoutet twice for a horizontal and a vertical layout  for a single device like the iPad. But even Adobe admits that their approach is not suited (maybe yet) for daily newspapers,

And even these magazines often have a placed layout only for one of the orientations and use very simple algorithmic layout for the other.

Manual layout will not be able to scale with the upcoming plethora of tablet devices. It is also impossible to have a manual layout that works well with user scalable font sizes (IMHO one of the big advantages of  tablets in an aging society).

Alltogehter manual layout is simply undoable on a daily, or subdaily basis for a multitude of screen sizes and devices.

Hence we are working towards story(tyoe) templates, , priorities, placement rules and layouthinting in our approaches towards newspaper-like renditions of newspaper content on tablets and  e-readers.

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But i don’t think, that algorithmic layout will be used near term in german newspapers.  May be in a support role for small ads and for initial placement on some pages, but not for the newspaper as a whole.

I now had the chance to have a closer look at a number of news apps on the iPad. Here is my ranking (To a large extent i agree with  the reviews of Engadget):

1. BBC News
2. Reuters News Pro for iPad
3. npr for iPad
4. The Wall Street Journal
5. USA Today
6. NYT Editor’s Choice
7. AP News
8. Welt iKiosk

But before i share some background info on why i’m doing this as well as some quick notes and screenshots for the different apps i have to note the following.:

I could not find a single link to any ressource on the web within any of the news apps i tested.

If you happened to find one within these apps or know of a news app that does, i would love to hear from you.

Some background

At the dpa-newslab we are actively investigating the different options for getting newspaper (and news agencies) print and online content onto ereaders and tablet devices.

On one hand this means that we are fully aware of the discrepancies and tensions between different fractions and schools of thought at newspapers, ranging from “This has to look and behave exactly as a printed newspaper” end of the spectrum to the “This has to be a fully digital native experience optimized experience” end at the opposite side of the spectrum (think VIV magazin).

On the other hand this means that we are investigating which of the three main content delivery channels (web, app, ebooks) makes most sense for which kind of content that newspapers and news agencies) have.

Our plan is to come up with a number of prototypes and products that range from the more traditional approaches to the wilder, more visualization heavy ones (Hey, we are a lab).  But more about this soon at the newslab blog.

Hence i was very interested to see with which ideas our colleagues came up (given 2 month time and no physical device to test it with).  But now the notes on the different apps.

BBC News

MY favourite app due to its vertical home page layout. The horizontal layout gives either too much or too little space for the index views of the different sections.Intuitive way of moving from article to article (with visual feedback in the index view)

Lots of video that starts super fast, (when it starts at all). Live radio streaming (although only one station :-(.)

Would have preferred a pop over for section selection instead of button bar in vertical mode. Irritating place for tickernear the top of the screen.

Reuters News Pro for iPad

Second place, because of its use of iPad / tablet user interface options in the overview screen and its use of video. as well as the interactive graphics in the Markets and Stocks  sections. I’m wodering if the latter are native charting components or done in Javascript. Does Anybody know?

On the minus side:  The Article detail view is ugly and the split screen accordion view in horizontal mode  is overkill.

npr for iPad

Third place, but close to Reuters. Clearly shows its radio heritage and focus, by indcating which articles are available as audio.  Easy to build a playlist and listen to it. Vast array of radio live streams (grouped by state) with ability to store favourite stations.

Big minus, no possibility to configure the topics of the home screen.

The Wall Street Journal

Clearly the best of the applications that follow closely the printed paper layout. Nicely lay out index pages.  Interesting navigation betwenn sections and articles within a section by vertically and horizontally swiping, Clever visual implementation of the paywall by obscuring parts of the screen.

Minus: Sending emails with forgotten passwords does not work. No font size change at the index pages possible (too hard a problem to recalculate the layout?) Pop-Up ads too intrusive.

USA Today

Often crashing app that tries to mimick the printed version. Nice solution for navigating between the sections.

But the Home pageuses iFrame like tricks. Small imagages in articles. Strange way of navigating within the pages of the article (vertically) and between the different articles of a section (horizontally). I expected it the other way round (IMHO the pagination of the articles would also have been technically easier that way).

NYT Editor’s Choice

A step back from what was shown on Jan. 27th. Clearly the print people had a say. Too little content wrapped in a layout that resembles  NYT skimmer and the NYT reader Air App and hence inherits the nice multicolumn arbitrary width layout of the single article pages).

AP News

Sorry my dear friends at the AP. I simply don’t get it.

Minus: Confusing design metaphor (at least for europeans). Figure it should resemble a bulletin board. These look distinctly different in germany!. Is the lower half of the index page a timeline or not? Waste of screen estate by not using the whole screen at the detail level (text, images, and video)  Too small images and videos, Completely counterintuitive and non HIG way of personalizing it, …

Plus side: Possibility to localize the news (but no longer german news, since AP sold it’s german subsidiary to ddp. Content available in th iPhone App though)

iKiosk

Weirdly named application by the german  newspaper Die Welt (Part of Axel Springer)

In short: A very thin wrapper around the PDF version of the paper, that does not work, since everything that triggers the accelerometer, unzooms to the whole page view (in which you can’t read anything). Unless this is fixed totally useless, afterwards only useless or a scam since after a 30day trial period the paper is only marginally cheaper than the printed version (ok. it’s free for print subscribers)

But presumably was worth doing it from a corporate point of view since it enabled Axel Springer Chairman & CEO Matthias Döpfner to show something in his talk with Charlie Rose (for a couple odf seconds)

A number of screenhots taken from various news apps. Right now not taken in any particular order.

Rem.: Unfortunately the iPad Screenshot facility does not store the orientation of the screenshot with the image, so that i couldn’t use the upload facility from the WordPress iPad App as i wantec too. Apple you have to fix that

My favourite  news apps so far: Reuters, BBC . Least favourable: NYT (the iPhone app is better) and iKiosk. More on this later

This is a short post about my first impressions after using the iPad and some of the applications i downloaded. I wasn’t able to spend more time yet, because i’m attending wherecamp today and tomorrow and then flying back to germany. But i thought it would be a worthwile exercise.

Buying experience

Since i knew i would be in the area i registered for picking up a 32GB iPad at the Palo Alto Store on March 12th. Yesterday i then decided not to come in early and be at the front of the line. Hence i turned up at the store a couple of minutes after 9am. At that time the queue for preordered  phones was approx. 70metres long while the purchase line was  only about 20metres long. Since i overheard that the preordered  line was served first, i stayed with my  original plan to pickup the preordered one. As expected, not only buyers showed up but also spectators and the media.

As a german i wondered why people showed up to pickup their preordered iPads when the can it have delivered at home. Most of them seemed to be there to meet friends, have some fun and share the experience.

While waiting we the preordered units where checked in by Apple staff with a custom app on their iphones, and we were treated with krispykremes and water. It took me about one hour to get to the front of the  line. While waiting i notices that Robert Scoble was there and overheard him telling somebody else that he was first in line (funnily i also overheard some seemingly senior Apple hardware engineer that came to the store not recognizing Scoble but only talking about “this guy”).

I was assigned a staff member  (Hi, Kevin) that helped me pickup my purchase. As usual with the Apple stores, the store was on my credit card companies blacklist, but as opposed to the store on 5th Avenue, the additional authorization worked at the first  try.

I didn’t buy any additional stuff but the VGA video adapter and was done in about 5 minutes total.

Scott Forstall and Katie (Cotton)

As Scott Forstall was at the store and talking to customers, i had to walk over and ask him about any new details on the europe launch.  Instead of answering himself he took the safe route and relayed the question to Katie (obviously Katie Cotton) who unsurprisingly gave me the official line of  “end of April”.  Nevertheless the fact of Scott being there and me being able to just walk over and ask him was a nice thing.

Activation

You might already have read it: You can’t use the iPad without having it connected to a computer that has iTunes installed. Since it is not neccessary to register the iPad (it is even not (yet) possible to register the iPad with a german phone number) and applications can be downloaded over wifi, there is actual no urgent need to have this step.

I unboxed and activated my iPad at Googles car park before going to Wherecamp2010. Since i already downloaded most of the apps i wanted to test / buy yesterday, i was able to sync them on the device without taking to much time from the conference sessions.

General impressions

In this  post i will only give some general impressions about the device and the various  apps i have used (mainly news related apps). A more detailed review of the different news apps will follow  suitly.  for the general impressions i will focus on the parts that you probably might not have heard elsewhere.

The iPad is definitely the couch surfing / computing / video watching device i had hoped for. Especially watching video, both video synced from iTunes / iTunesU as well as video streamed via wifi (e.g. in the Reuters, BBC and ABC apps) was amazingly good. I definitely can see this device as a major step for no longer needing a TV set. It makes watching video whereever you have a wifi connection so easy and seamless . You can even watch it together  with your spouse without too many problems.

Unfortunately  i’m not sure that you will be able to watch web based video on the big screen, since the VGA adapter seemingly only works with certain applications, such as Videos, Keynote and Youtube. As with the iPhone and the composite/s-video out  it does not replicate the iPad display on an external screen. Since all the apps i’ve seen the video out working with are Apple apps, and i’m not aware of an Video-Out API i’m afraid, that video out might be something that is dissappointing.

Update: Jens tells me that there is an Video Out API. Thanks a lot

Unfortunately i’m right now unable to test if H.264 encoded video will work within safari as well as third party apps.

After reading the reviews i’m also positely surprised of the useability of the onscreen keyboard in landscape mode. It is definitely good enough for me for note taking during meetings and conferences (tested it this afternoon at wherecamp).

Pixeldoubling IMHO works well enough with most iPhone only apps that i’m wondering why the heck they didn’t make it an option that is enabled by default and you have to enable it for every single app. At least it remembers the setting for the app.

Gestern gab es eine Pressemitteilung der Welt Gruppe in der mitgeteilt werden, dass die Welt und die Welt am Sonntag die ersten deutschen  Zeitungen seien, die im iPad-Store verfügbar sind:

Zur Markteinführung des iPad in den Vereinigten Staaten am 3. April 2010 ist die WELT-Gruppe mit einer eigenen Applikation im App-Store vertreten. Mit der „Kiosk-App“ haben Nutzer die Möglichkeit, die aktuellen Ausgaben von WELT, WELT KOMPAKT und WELT am SONNTAG auf dem neuen Tablet von Apple zu lesen.

…

Jan Bayer, Verlagsgeschäftsführer WELT-Gruppe: „Die WELT-Gruppe als Innovationsführer im Segment der Qualitätszeitungsmarken ist von Anfang an auf dem iPad vertreten. Wir haben uns bewusst dafür entschieden, zum Marktstart unsere starken Zeitungsmarken als digitale Ausgaben auf dem iPad anzubieten. Bereits bei der iPhone-App der WELT hat sich gezeigt, dass die PDF-Funktionalität ein sehr stark genutztes Angebot ist

Natürlich wurde diese Mitteilung sofort von den verschiedensten Medien aufgegriffen und hat es auch auf die Rivva-Homepage geschafft (da ich momentna in USA bin Where2.0 und Wherecamp, verzichte ich mal auf individuelle Links). Dabei ist folgender Tenor zu lesen:

• Teuer
• Was, nur PDF?

Zu dem ersten Punkt möchte ich mich nicht äussern da ich mir nicht die Mühe gemacht habe den Teil mit den Preisen zu lesen :-). Aber bzgl PDF habe ich eine Meinung.

Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass es schon einigen Druck von Seiten ASV  gab, um zum Launchzeitpunkt im iPad Store vertreten zu sein.

Ich fand schon die Idee nicht schlecht , dass die Welt iPhone App PDF  mitbrachte, da es praktisch umsonst mit dem iPhoneSDK  mitkommt. Die eingebaute Preview App kann natürlich PDFs darstellen, da schon NextStep (der Vorläufer von MacOSX) auf Display Postscript basierte, und der Window Server von Mac OS X auf Postscript basiert (Wikipedia).

Via AirSharing haber ich schon etliche PDF Dokumente auf mein iPhone gebracht und dort gelesen / angesehen. Die deutlich größere Auflösung  des iPad zusammen mit der Tabloid Grösse der Welt kompakt lassen für mich die PDF-Variante für diese Kombination aus Produkt und Gerät durchaus attraktiv erscheinen. Insbesondere dann, wenn man nur wenig Zeit zur Entwicklung einer App und gar keine Möglichkeit zum Testen der Applikation auf dem echten Gerät hat.

PDF ist damit die Variante die unter den gegebenen Voraussetzungen: Zeit, Aufwand, Testability etc. den besten Kompromiss darstellt, wenn man zum Stratzeitpunkt im iPad-Store vertreten sein will.

Die entscheidende Frage ist die nach der Geschwindigkeit des Renderings, aber auch hier ist davon auszugehen, dass das iPad deutlich schneller ist als das iPhone. Und dieses ist in Bezug auf ds PDF rendering deutlich schneller als alle PDFs die ich auf eReadern wie dem Kindle und dem Sony Reader gesehen habe. Dort war PDF für mich bislang keine Option.

Natürlich ist PDF eine der Optionen die wir uns im dpa newslab im Feld ereading ansehen, neben einer Reihe von anderen. Allerdings ist es für mich /uns nicht die primäre Variante die für alle Zeitungen geeignet ist. Aber unter den gegebenen Umständen kann ich die Entscheidung der Welt Gruppe nachvollziehen.

Wie sich das ganze anfühlt werde ich am Samstag sagen können, wenn ich mein iPad abgeholt habe :-) Einer der Voreteile wenn man gerade in USA ist.

Vielleicht haben die geänderten WePad-Photos auch etwas damit zu tun. Von diesen sind nämlich die Verweise auf das Abendblatt und Welt verschwunden.