Smithsonian Institution releases a new iPad app for Smithsonian Magazine: a well-designed, brilliantly executed and entertaining tablet edition

Buried within the mass of replica editions released over the last 24 hours I found a new iPad app for Smithsonian Magazine. The app, the third for the iPad from the Smithsonian, is as well-designed and inventive as you might expect from the institution.

The free app can be found inside Apple's Newsstand, and offers a free preview issue (the December issue), so publishers will want to download the app just to take a good look. Readers can buy an annual subscription for $19.99, or a monthly one for $1.99. Individual issues are priced at $3.99.

Print subscribers get free access (as they should).

I downloaded the preview issue simply because it was there (and I can't possibly buy every magazine released for the iPad, can I?).

The December issue is 230MB and downloaded very quickly. Yes, very quickly, thank you. Readers will love that, especially travelers looking to download something in a hurry before boarding a plane.

The issue opens with a very short video. Now I know some consider this a gimmick, but if done well I think creatives should have this in their bag of tricks to pull out when they want. I loved the cover (which you can see below), and video simply told me that this was, indeed, designed for the iPad.

“This technology will change the nature of magazines in a fundamental way, while preserving the core experience of a magazine as curated content,” Bill Allman, chief digital officer at Smithsonian Enterprises said online of the new app. “What’s great about these new tools is that they take a magazine like Smithsonian, in particular, to a whole other dimension."

Maria Keehan, Smithsonian Magazine’s art director, clearly plans to use the new digital edition to bring added material to tablet readers. "Where you see one picture in the magazine, there might be three on the app that are equally as beautiful,” said Keehan. In our cover story on the Haleakala Crater in Hawaii, actually being able to hear a person’s voice—you can watch a video of Clifford Naeole chanting the traditional Hawaiian songs—is so incredible.”

There is no reason to go into all the details of the magazine, you can check it out yourself. But I will be interested to see if anyone can come up with any reason to complain about this one: it loads fast, offers free access to print subscribers, discounts the subscription for new readers, and is well designed. I suppose should pusher of PDFs will have to post a negative review, just for kicks.

All the crazy iPad rumors are proved wrong again (apparently) as Apple prepares for iPad 3 launch event

With just about any set of Apple product rumors, it is a wise idea to always answer any new rumor with the response "show me the pictures". Once the pictures start showing up you are probably on the right track.

This morning the WSJ's All Things D reporter John Paczkowski posted that he has heard that the iPad 3 intro event will be scheduled for the first week in March. This might just be another rumor, but it falls in line with what one would consider the normal time frame for an iPad launch. The first iPad event, if you recall, was at the end of January of 2010, with the actual product launch the first week of April. Last year the event got moved up to the first week of March with the actual launch shortly thereafter. Expect that same pattern for the iPad 3.

The pictures of iPad 3 components are starting to appear – or at least they may well be the pictures. But I wouldn't bet against these being legit simply because they confirm the most conservative rumors about the next iPad.

To recap, this is what the consensus seems to be about the next Apple tablet:

• 9.7 inch display: forget about those silly 7-inch tablet rumors, please.
• Higher resolution: 2,048 x 1,536 pixels, to be exact. This has been widely rumored and may be the most exciting thing about the new iPad 3 for many. But while I think pushing the specs is great, I can't think how this really changes things for users. Those fuzzy replica editions will just be fuzzier unless the vendors up the resolution of this apps, after all.**
• Faster process and faster graphics: for an original iPad owner like myself, faster processing is a must. The first generation iPad isn't a turtle, but it can sometimes be frustratingly slow. But again, this won't really change the user experience unless new software takes advantage of the faster speeds (and it will, as I will explain below)
• Better cameras, etc.: I'm sure there will be some additional hardware upgrades, though, again, these won't get me very excited, I bet.

OK, Mr. Cynic (me), if these upgrades don't get you excited then what will? Software.

As an iPhone and iPad owner, I know that any hardware upgrades are only of value of new software takes advantage of them. The ol' spec war we used to see in PCs was important because we loved seeing the processing times of a Photoshop file continue to go down. But, you know, my under powered Mac mini can process a photo so fast now that I simply don't think about this anymore.

But with mobile and tablet devices, the processing power is being put to use to power all new features. What are these features? Well, one of the first a few years ago was Facetime; then it was Siri.

The iPad 3 will no doubt have Siri. But it will also have anything else Apple wants to introduce in its newest version of iOS. What most rumor sites continue to ignore is the fact that a new version of the operating system generally gets released just prior to the hardware release. This new OS release is what contains many of the goodies that users get excited about.

** I am quite sure that developers will find ways to make the higher resolution pay off for them. For media folk, however, higher resolution means larger files are needed for their publications. Users are already complaining about the size of many magazines, higher resolution could make things worse.

FT & NYT report that Greek leaders reach austerity deal

While most news organizations are reporting that the Greek coalition leaders were unable to reach a deal on the latest bailout, refusing to make cuts to pensions, the Financial Times is reporting that, in fact, an agreement has been reached.

"We now have an agreement. Concrete details of measures to be finalized within next 15 days," Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos was quoted as stating this afternoon (local time).

If you think this will end, even for a while, the drama ongoing in Greece you would be wrong.

The unemployment figures are now in from November and the numbers are not good: 20.9 percent are unemployed.

"The main reasons behind this deterioration - which is expected to continue until the first quarter of the year at least - are the increased uncertainty over the economy's prospects, the prospect of additional austerity and a possible increase in the grey economy," said Nikos Magginas, at National Bank.

"The fall of employed people by an annual 9.4 percent in November was shocking," Magginas said. Bank.

The newly agreed to terms for the next bailout will only make the situation worse.

The Athens News outlined the measures to be taken:

• A direct cut to the minimum basic wage by 22 percent at all levels of pay contracts
• A further reduction of 10 percent on the basic wage of first-time employees between the ages of 18-25, bringing the total reduction on this category to 32 percent
• Reduced basic wages to remain frozen throughout the 2012-2015 period
• A timetable of negotiations with social partners until July for the drastic revision of the National General Collective Labour Contract (EGSSE) “to harmonise it with that of countries at similar competitive position”
• A reduction of 2 percent on social insurance contributions to the IKA private sector fund

Both the Athens News and ekathimerini.com have continued to be good news sources for English language readers, though Twitter is clearly the most timely format.

Many journalists have begun tweeting their news reports directly, partially as a way to alert their media outlets that other sources have additional information.

Less honorable news outlets, however, have been using Twitter to simply drive traffic to their own websites, then have a shell of a story online that is really just a link to the original story produced by another outlet. This might be called piracy by some, but modern media executives call it journalism.

Update: The official announcement from the Prime Minister (with the inevitable poor Google Translation):

ΓΡΑΦΕΙΟ ΤΥΠΟΥ 
ΠΡΩΘΥΠΟΥΡΓΟΥ
Αθήνα,9 Φεβρουαρίου 2012
Ολοκληρώθηκαν σήμερα το πρωί με επιτυχία οι διαβουλεύσεις της κυβέρνησης με την τρόικα, σχετικά με το θέμα, το οποίο είχε απομείνει ανοικτό για περαιτέρω επεξεργασία και συζήτηση. Οι πολιτικοί αρχηγοί συμφώνησαν με το αποτέλεσμα των διαβουλεύσεων αυτών.
Κατόπιν τούτου υπάρχει γενικότερη συμφωνία για το περιεχόμενο του νέου προγράμματος εν’ όψει και της αποψινής συνεδρίασης του Γιούρογκρουπ. Όπως είναι γνωστό, το πρόγραμμα συνοδεύει τη νέα δανειακή σύμβαση με την οποία η Ελλάδα θα χρηματοδοτηθεί με 130 δισεκατομμύρια ευρώ.

Athens, February 9, 2012
Completed this morning with the success of government consultation with the Troika on the subject, which was left open for further elaboration and discussion. The political leaders agreed on the outcome of these consultations.
Therefore there is a general agreement on the new program in view of tonight's meeting and the Giourogkroup. As is known, the program came with the new loan agreement with which Greece will be financed with 130 billion euros.

GIE Media launches an iPad edition for its bi-monthly trade industry title American Manufacturing

The Ohio headquartered B2B media company GIE Media has launched a new iPad app edition for one of its trade titles, American Manufacturing. While the app breaks no new ground when it comes to how to distribute a controlled circulation magazine on tablets, it does do a decent job of bridging the gap between native tablet design and replica edition.

The free app, American Manufacturing, is a stand alone app, offering no Newsstand support. As a result, there is no way to subscribe to the tablet edition. Additionally, there is also no notifications support, so the publisher would not be able to alert readers that a new issue is available. Finally, there is also no registration mechanism.

As you can see, the app does not really address the fundamental issue of controlled circulation publications for tablets: how to limit the distribution of the product to only "qualified" readers, and either locking out all others, or charging them a subscription fee.

The app does, however, attempt to bridge the gap between replica and native designs.

Upon installing the app one is taken to the library where one issue is available – January/February. (There is also "News Feeds" that can be downloaded, presumably an RSS feed.)

The issue available weighs in at 205MB – a moderately large file. The reason for its size is that the app works in both portrait and landscape ... sort of.

In fact, only the editorial pages have been redesigned to work in both orientations, while the ads from the print magazine have been left in their original, portrait layout. The editorial pages have also been enhanced with additional tablet features such as pages that scroll, embedded photo galleries, and the like.

To accomplish this, it appears that only the full page ads have been brought into the tablet edition, allowing the designers to design new editorial pages without having to work around modular ads.

I think it works to a certain degree. Yes, it would have been nice to have new ad copy for the full page ads, but getting B2B clients or their agencies to supply new artwork for the tablet edition would probably have been a nightmare.

Left: the column from the associate publisher/editorial director is re-designed for the tablet edition; Middle: ads, however, are left in their original portrait layouts, though embedded video can be found on some; Right: the TOC, redesigned for the iPad app.

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American Manufacturing, the print magazine, is an unaudited bi-monthly with a rather incredibly low page rate of $1750 per page. It also purports to distribute to Central and South America. So we are not talking about a multi-million dollar venture here.

I mention this because all this has to be taken into account when measuring the business potential of a tablet edition for a B2B title. Do you, for instance, charge an additional fee to appear in the tablet edition? Do you charge readers who are not qualified? These are just some of the issues B2B publishers will have to work through as they begin to experiment with tablet editions.

For GIE Media, they have taken a first step with one of their titles.

(Lawn & Landscape, a much healthier B2B title owned by GIE Media, also has an iPad app. But that app avoids all these issues by simply being a replica edition created by Texterity (and "sold" under the Texterity name, rather that that of GIE Media). That app, too, is not in Newsstand, and does not charge for content.

Lawn & Landscape is a pretty thick magazine compared to American Manufacturing, and a monthly to boot. That would put quite a strain on a creative department if the publisher decided to launch a native designed app such as the new one for American Manufacturing.)

Managing notifications is proving a difficult challenge for media companies weak on social media skills

If a media company were a "friend" of yours they would be like the guy who posts 20 updates on your Facebook wall, leading you inevitably to "unfriend" the offender.

Thus I "unfriended" USA Today... today.

It doesn't surprise me that the Gannett newspaper would not understand the basics of social media – don't annoy – this is an area that so many old school companies appear to be poor at managing. (I receive at least one email a day from Williams-Sonoma which are now totally ignored, completely defeating the purpose of the promotions).

I turn notifications on for very few apps now simply because are such an abused feature. Many publishers have started to explain what they intend to use them for – generally to inform readers that a new issue is available.

For publishers new to the app game, and hence to notifications, here are a few simple rules to remember:

• Notifications are not tweets – the reader/user is not expecting a steady stream of notifications from your media property.
• Determine what stories reach the level of importance that a notification is warranted – many social media savvy media firms tweet many, or most of their news stories. That's fine. But a notification means that the news is both important and time sensitive. The notification from USA Today that the Giants had won the Super Bowl, sent out hours after the game... no, not worth a notification.
• Do I need to know this now? – Since most readers/users get their notifications on their mobile phones, the issue of timeliness arises. This is a tough call. It would be nice if newspapers, in particular, could have separate notifications by category. For instance, I really don't need to know that the Fed is holding rates where they are at, but someone else might.

One reason media firms make a mess of notifications is that they assign a person to create these and, frankly, to them everything is worth sending a notification. Eventually we'll all get this down to a science, but if we don't, readers will be routinely turning off notifications, depriving media firms of a powerful communications tool.

Update: More information on the new CLOUD Magazine app from cloud storage solutions company Brinkster

As I promised in my original post, here is more information about the new tablet magazine, CLOUD Magazine, from cloud storage solutions company Brinkster Communications Corp.

As I suspected, the publishing team used Mag+ to create their new tablet magazine app, according to Jared Stauffer, President & CEO of Brinkster.

"We built the app ourselves using the Mag+ platform. This method worked well for us and we would highly recommend it," Stauffer wrote me last night.

As for why they created their own industry app:

"Sure, there’s a lot of information out there about the Cloud," Stauffer said, "but who’s it aimed at? Most of it is only relevant to large enterprises, Fortune 500/1000 companies with 1,000+ employee companies. These companies have a CTO/CIO and IT teams the size of most small businesses. And, these larger companies have much larger resources to tap in to when migrating to the Cloud," Stauffer explained.

"So how much of it is applicable to SMB (small and medium businesses)? Not much. We created Cloud Magazine to fill the gap."