von gkamp
 

It’s now already over 5 months that our  first iPad-App “Schwäbische Zeitung” entered  the app store on May 5th. Just this week this app received an XMA cross-media award from WAN-IFRA ( We actually came in on 3rd place behind VG+ from Norway and the Sunday Times, and ahead of the two other german winners Welt HD and RP+)

The original plan was to publish some  background information on our e-Publishing approach along with the launch of the App. Well that didn’t happen, we were just too busy. But now we’ve finally found some time and this post is the start to a little series.

iWimpff: The comic

Obviously the client component (code named iWimpff) is an essential part of the suite. And the most visible one.

In order to explain the  motivation and rationale  behind the client framework to a broader audience we decided to take advantage of the fact that Benjamin Rabe, the teams graphic designer, is also an avid fingerpainter.

So we had a little bit of fun and produced an introductory comic (already back in January /February):

[Show as slideshow]

(There are also PDFs of the whole comic available for download in english and german)

For those more interested in the hard facts, these are elaborated in upcoming blog posts. For now: iWimpff is based on the idea / goal of a zig-zag inspired generic content rendering framework. Basically it is a two-dimensional browser that implements four additional implicit links (prev-x, next-x, prev-y, next-y) and uses web-technology (HTML5, CSS3, Javascript) whenever feasible  and or technically possible and resorts to native implementations only when necessary (e.g. because of processor speed and memory constraints)

It is supposed to enable more print-centric content renditions (e.g. multiple columns, paging) as well as more online-centric renditions (e.g. single column and scrolling).

Right now there are two apps based on the iWimpff in production: “Schwäbische Zeitung”  is the app of a german regional newspaper in south west germany.  It is using a print-centrix approach and even includes a viewer for the PDFs  of the print.

The other, an app for the executives of Daimler AG is a pure B2B app and hence not available in the AppStore.

Your feedback please

I was able to show off  various prototypes and release candidates to (IMHO very knowledgeable) people of both sides of the pond. Generally the feedback was very positive and the even the prototypes were graded as one of the best solutions seen so far.  So go and download “Schwäbische Zeitung” (iTunes Link) grab a couple of free editions (or buy some) , have a closer look and tell us what you think.

We are in general very interested to present and  discuss our ideas with as many people as possible. Feel free to comment, to send an email to newslab@dpa-info.com or a DM @dpa_newslab.  And if you think that a presentation of our approach would fit into the schedule of a certain conference, please tell us and we’ll see if we can make it happen.