TAKEAWAY: On this, my last day of a action-packed week in Sydney, Australia, to participate in the PANPA Future Forum 2011 conference, a highlight of my day was my little workshop with the digital team of The Daily Telegraph, who prepare to launch a new version of their iPad app.
This week in Australia: Part 5
TAKEAWAY: The PANPA Future Forum 2011 conference opens here in Sydney tomorrow. Here is an overview, as I prepare my presentation. ALSO: In Dubai, the Gulf News takes a look at its front page navigation as part of its continuous efforts to upgrade the quality of its presentation.
A new iPad app for The Daily Telegraph
This was, indeed, the highlight of my day of critiques and workshops in Sydney today, my last day in the beautiful city Down Under.
I met with the talented and energetic group of The Daily Telegraph’s digital team to review their prototypes for an upcoming upgrade of their already existing app, available thru the iTunes store since November 2010.
But the material presented to me shows a dramatic change from the 1.0 version that appears there now. They are moving from an app that resembles the printed product quite closely, to one that will surprise you with its originality, uniqueness and aesthetics. True, part of our workshop discussion was to eliminate the small “remnants” of print thinking that appear here and there, but nothing major.
This is a normal process that all teams developing news apps based on an existing printed product must go through, a sort of ritual, especially if print designers are involved (indeed, we know).
But, as I always tell my workshop groups: it took early television development in the US about five years to abandon the radio paradigm. Most of those who came to produce television in the late 1930s were radio professionals. In their view, you simply put a person on who sat behind a desk and a microphone; no movement took place at all until a few years later.
So I call the imitation of the newspaper page on an iPad app “radio days”, and in our workshops we all discuss radio days aspects of the app, which are, I must admit, still inevitable.
In today’s workshop with The Daily Telegraph a couple of “radio days” moments crept up in the discussion, and we all laughed and made corrections.
I know that the sketches I am likely to see in the next few days from The Telegraph’s team will bring us all closer to the goal: a 3.0 version news app that I know will be talked about in the industry as a model of what can be achieved when sophistication, functionality and a sense of tablet uniqueness combine.
Let’s all be on the lookout for that!
