Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Astronaut Magazine, DMA Launch of the Year 2011
Every now and then, once a year if you’re lucky, you get to see something that changes the way you think about what you do. That’s how I felt the first time I saw the Sports Illustrated iPad demo back in 2009, the volcanically crowdsourced Stranded in 2010 and Astronaut, Launch of the Year at the 2011 Digital Magazine Awards.
Astronaut was among the magazines I was assigned to judge for the 2011 DMAs. At over 1GB it was a hell of a download and I have to admit, I had my doubts. As it turned out, it was a privilege to be reviewing what other judges on the panel called a “lovely experience” and a “groundbreaking magazine”.
Astronaut is made in Berlin and is all about giving independent filmmakers a forum to present documentaries and projects. It’s this mission to showcase video that makes it so special. The magazine is made for the iPad, quite deliberately made for iPad, and it uses all tricks of the developing tablet trade to seamlessly integrate classic magazine content with video.
Astronaut was first conceived as a print magazine with an accompanying DVD, but it works much better on the iPad where the video is right there alongside the words, helping to tell the stories. The publication presents a total of 80 minutes of video content in clips that run from four to 20 minutes long. But far from being a glorified show reel, each video is embedded in a long-form feature article that practises the best of old-school magazine crafts – writing, typography and photography.
June 10th’s launch issue features film of photographers and artists at work alongside the narrative of their ideas and aspiration. There’s a profile of Robert Rath, founder of the Erased Tapes independent record label accompanied by a hauntingly beautiful music video (below) from one of the label’s lartists. There’s a behind-the-scenes look at video game design and “Zoomer’s Treasures” a found-documentaryabout a junk lovers paradise stumbled upon by filmmaker Sam Huntley as he drove through rural Kansas.
Through 12 feature articles, the editors and designers have blended classic magazine content with video wonderfully well, making great use of layered text for both navigation and design. Unlike many made-for-iPad magazines, it’s difficult to get lost in Astronaut. The page progression remains fairly linear and a screen tap on any page will bring up a scrolling TOC that will take the reader to wherever they want to be in the publication.
Priced at €2.99/£2.49, the magazine is available from the App store, where you’ll see the best reviewer comment you could ever hope to see: “I enjoyed this first edition… when will issue 2 appear?”
Olafur Arnalds – Lojso from Astronaut Magazine on Vimeo.
Digital Magazine Awards Launch of the Year, 2011
Astronaut Video Magazine
Twitter: @Astronautmag
Download Astronaut from iTunes
Digital Magazine Award Winners 2011
While I was stuck, delayed, at Newark airport Wednesday night, the shining stars of the digital magazine industry enjoyed a gala evening at the London College of Communication to hear Wired UK announced Digital Magazine of the Year 2011.
In its second year, the competition attracted entries from 31 countries and the advances in such a short space of time has been quite remarkable, proof positive of the phenomenal change that is taking place in the digital magazine space. The most notable shift has been the move away from flash publications – more than half of the titles I judged this year were on the iPad.
You can see a full list of the winners over at DigitalMagazineAwards.com with the winning lineup including Wired UK, The New Yorker, BBC Focus, TRVL and British Vogue.
I’ll review the category winners here over the next couple of weeks. First up, launch of the year Astronaut.
Apple’s iOS5 Newsstand: lots of coverage, lots of questions
Related: 4 problems Apple’s iOS5, iCloud and Newsstand could fix
As always, coverage of Apple’s latest announcement has been off the scale. iOS5 brings a whole bunch of shiny new features and the beginnings of a cloud-borne revolution that is going to demote the PC to be just another device. Whatever!
Right now I’m more interested in what the Newsstand will mean for digital magazines. Here’s what Apple says about it.
Newsstand is a beautiful, easy-to-organize bookshelf displaying the covers of all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in one place. A new section of the App Store™ features just subscription titles, and allows users to quickly find the most popular newspapers and magazines in the world. If subscribed to, new issues appear in the Newsstand and are updated automatically in the background so you always have the latest issue and the most recent cover art.
Basically it’s the iBookstore, but for magazines and with subscriptions and regular content updates. So far so good. Anything that makes it easier to find magazines in the chaos of the App store is a big plus. At the moment magazines fight for attention alongside “games, calculators and farting noise makers,” as Marcus Grimm so eloquently puts it on the NXTBook Media blog. But what does this mean for “traditional” digital magazine suppliers?
Zinio is excited to see attention finally for digital mags. We’ve worked hard for 10 years & just getting started. Stay tuned #gozinio—
(@zinio) June 07, 2011
Zino – interestingly describing itself as “The World’s Largest Newsstand” for a while now – is putting on a brave face. Optimistic for a company that, according to the New York Times, is one of a dozen application providers likely to be driven to extinction by integrated iOS5 features.
Rex Hammock is a lot more positive on the survival of independent Apps threatened by iOS5, and there’s still a lot of room to be positive. Beyond the basic, rather obvious functionality described at the WWDC, no one really has any details on the Newsstand. How do publishers get their magazines on there? Unlikely that they will be able to adopt much of a DIY approach; that’s just not Apple’s style. And what formats will be supported? As Jeremy Leslie on Magculture asks: “…will Apple introduce an iBooks-like dedicated production method?”
If they do, interactivity is pretty much a no-no in the iBookstore right now. So will the newsstand be all about flat magazine replicas? Does that make it a promotional platform for enhanced magazines in the App store, or could magazine publishers use enhanced apps to promote regular subscription content? And how will publications with controlled/free circulations get on? It’s tough to see Apple spending much time figuring out how the Newsstand will work best for titles that deliver them 30% of nothing.
Overall, initial impressions of the Newsstand are positive, and like Steve Jobs himself, the magazine sector seems pretty excited to see what the developers do with the 1,500 new APIs in iOS5.
For some excellent early insight on the Newsstand launch, take a look at these posts:
- What iOS5 means to Indie publishing | Letter to Jane
On the iPad the magazine competes with every book, video game, 101 great wallpapers, and sex tips app in the market. It was a bad problem that needed a fix, and today that might have happened.
To make use of the new features, publishers must invoke the newly added “Newsstand Kit framework”. From what we have been able to understand, some simple settings will help an iPhone or iPad recognise that the app as a magazine or newspaper that belongs in the Newsstand.
- Newsstand: What it means for tablet publishing | Pressrun Blog
From a reader’s perspective, the facility for a well-designed, automatically updated, and fully aggregated periodical app will no doubt be a welcome addition. For content providers, the ‘killer app’ in this killer app may be the secret compartment that lies behind the bookcase – the “Newsstand Store”.
Poetry’s second coming… “Slouching towards the iPad to be re-born…”
Faber & Faber is dragging poetry into the 21st century with an iPad version of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is nothing to do with digital magazines, but it was too pretentious a headline to pass up (Yeah, I know it’s Yeats not Eliot).
I actually think the centre will hold for Faber on this; it’s a brilliant idea, taking full advantage of iPad functionality to give published poetry back it’s voice. The app features a new filmed performance of the poem by Fiona Shaw, readings by Eliot and Ted Hughes and video perspectives from, among others Seamus Heaney. Not bad for £7.99
I can’t wait for someone to get a hold of Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. Meanwhile, here’s T.S. Eliot reading The Burial of the Dead from The Waste Land.
B2B magazine people care too
B2B people are every bit as caring as other magazine people, but the pressures of the sector mean they don’t always get the chance to show it through their publications. UBM Electronics has used a digital magazine to break out of that box, launching a special digital edition of its EE Times publication – “The Day the Lights Went Out in Japan.” – to show support for their friends and colleagues in the Japanese electronics industry and raise money for disaster relief in the country.
The digital magazine, published on the NXTBook platform, includes analysis of the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami for the Japanese people and the global electronics industry. A statement on the EE Times website says, “We attempt to look beyond the crippled wafer fabs, auto plants and disrupted global supply chains to consider the lessons of the Great Japanese Quake 0f 2011. Our intent is to show solidarity with the people of Japan, and understanding for all.” Sponsors of the special edition were asked to donate $5000 a page to relief efforts and editors urge readers to join them by giving $10 to the American Red Cross.
In a business where the bottom line is everything, hats of to the people at UBM Electronics for taking advantage of the digital magazine format to do something pretty special. They have turned around a 78-page book in 8 days, honouring the victims of the disaster, but also delivering highly niched, mission critical technical information that the best B2B magazines excel in.
