http://carpeaqua.com/2011/12/04/on-magazines-and-the-ipad/
“Reading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration.”
100% agree with all the points in Justin Williams’ post. To add to the frustration- many magazines have created their own navigation schemes that make users tap and swipe like mad in order to figure out what portion of the content will offer some reward.
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/12/01/why-siri-is-like-skeuomorphic-uis-the-magic-is-just-skin-deep/
”Skeumorphic UIs resemble physical objects, but they cannot hope to emulate the myriad ways we have to emulate physical objects — so they are always doomed to disappoint on some level if we let ourselves be fooled.”
The latest hoopla regarding Apple’s iPhone 4S Siri feature and its lack of information on abortion clinics has tied into another hot topic in the design world: Skeuomorphism. Simply put, I think it’s amazing that consumer technology is getting to the point where things like UI and UX seriously matter to ordinary, non techie, people.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/zinio-raises-20-million-for-digital-newsstand/
Zinio provides global access to thousands of magazine titles from most major publishers in a variety of languages. The company’s website allows publications to be read online or offline on desktop computers (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and mobile devices such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, WebOS and Android handsets (they just launched their Kindle Fire offering).
I used to hate on Zinio back during their initial iPad launch because of the poor user experience but for a strict magazine reader, you really can’t get a better experience these day. Hopefully this new round of funding will bring on new features to the platform that will enhance the reader experience.
Congrats to Zinio!
Stumbled upon some notes from Anoop Ranganath’s Foursquare Core Data talk at my Brooklyn iOS Developer Meetup earlier this year. Below are slides and info from that night:
A few months ago I started some development work on a new business venture named MagAppZine, While you may already know a bit about my thoughts on magazine publishing, I’m really glad TUAW took a moment to write something about my company.
Peep it here: Making your iPad Magazine
The first thing I noticed once my company had more members than just me was the need to track and version our code base. To get you started, here are some things you should consider.
Version control
At both of my startups, we use git for version control. It works really well and the branch/merging/tagging system is awesome. If you’re unfamiliar with git, check out Git Immersion. One thing I should mention is that if you are working on an iOS project and using git, you will want to make sure you create a .gitignore file otherwise you’ll run into some issues when team members open your shared project. Here are some instructions on configuring your .gitignore for xcode.
Code Storage
In a distributed code environment, each member of your team has the ability to checkout and commit new code to the project. In order to do so, you need to have the code base hosted in a central location. We use Dropbox has our repository. It’s free (up to 2GB) and it works really well. For general instructions on how to set that up, check out this stackoverflow post: git+dropbox?. You can also sign up for paid accounts on Beanstalk or Github to keep private repos at their sites. These paid services also have additional services that are not available by going the Dropbox route.
Email notifications
I can not stress enough how important it is to have email notifications on code commits. I know what you’re thinking, “I’m gonna get an email every time someone commits code?!? That’s annoying!” You’ll be surprised how beneficial this is. Not only is it useful for tracking down bugs that may have been *inadvertently* introduced but if you assign the email receiver to a group email, everyone on your team can keep a pulse on how the project as a whole is progressing. You can always create an email filter to manage these message. Here is a neat little plugin that will allow you to send HTML style emails on every commit- https://github.com/bitboxer/git-commit-notifier
Tools
Before committing or merging any code I usually fire up gitX to review my changes. It’s also a good way to see a graphical representation of your git commit, branches, and other related info.
Disclaimer:
I know some of you may be thinking “but XCode has SVN support!”. Trust me, you will learn to love life a little more if you try out git. If SVN is working for you in XCode, great! This article is not for you.