Beyond the specific case, most existing iPad magazine apps suck because they offer essentially static content, they suck because they are far away from being interactive. Creating interactivity does not mean embedding some multimedia “bells and whistles”.

Most magazine apps suck because they are basically heavy PDFs with just some interactive elements. Almost all the solutions in the market are PDF-based systems such as Adobe’s DPS (clearly) or Mag+. The reasons are obvious. Publishing world is PDF-centric, people know how to use InDesign, and publishers want to reuse the knowledge and the investment done. So the solution is to create interactive PDF files with InDesign (adding some Flash-like interactivity on the top of the standard format) and to pay for a service that packages them into a bundle suited for distribution through iPad (or to pay for a commercial library for PDF-rendering). Understandable budget reasons (I, too, have developed an app of this category). But in this world a magazine app is a PDF reader.

Another digital publishing world is possible. And just to be clear, not a HTML5-based world where a magazine app is a browser. A magazine app makes sense if it’s a true native app, if it adds value to the user experience in terms of usability and functionality, takes advantage of the capabilities of the device, and makes a clean break from the incumbents.

Many have commented that The Magazine is the model to follow, and it is evident. Everything becomes immediately obvious when you see it. It is certainly the best example of how to distribute publications via Apple’s Newsstand, it is intuitive and immediate, but memorable editorials can not be the only lever to succeed in all situations. When I think of an iPad magazine app, I think of something like an iBook textbook, or an interactive children’s storybook, for magazine publishing. Truly interactive publications with diagrams that readers can rotate and pan-and-zoom, with photo galleries, videos, maps. A magazine should bring articles to life. Readers should be able to truly interact with the magazine, manipulate objects with their fingertips, search for content, highlight text. Magazines should take advantage of the fact that they are always connected to the web, for example with newspaper-specific modules that support polls, comments, photo sharing.

Science fiction? I don’t think so. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple releases a sort of Newsstand Author. Or allowing the download of XIBs? Or what? Well. When I think of this, I don’t think ad hoc iOS apps, but a framework in which an issue is a bundle of resource files and metadata and the app is a sort of runtime environment that dynamically renders magazine issues delivered via Newsstand. XUL? XAML? Something like that. But there is no need to define a new protocol, the rendering instructions can be expressed in HTML (or its subset). In this way you can have truly native experiences, but also issues easy to produce, and portability. Time to start-up?

What do you think about it? Any opinion or feedback from you are welcome.

Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

It is the last general principle of the “decalogue”. Probably the least important because it’s preferable that a system is so easy to use that no further help is needed to supplement the user interface itself. But this goal cannot always be met. Some users will want to become “experts” rather than casual users, and some intermediate users need reminding to perform their objectives.

It’s important to highlight that:

• help is not a replacement for a bad design, the presence of help and documentation doesn’t reduce the usability requirements,
• a help system must be well designed as well.

There are various types of help systems you can provide, but it is always better to use minimal instructions. Nobody read the manual. The help will only be used when the user are in some kind of difficulty, in need of immediate help.

What should not be done (especially in a mobile app)

• A single very long file that lumps everything together. Users will lose focus by scrolling up and down (especially on a mobile device).
• Don’t provide too much information. Users who come to help pages are usually already confused, so they aren’t inclined to read long blocks of text.
• As an embedded web page. It is a common temptation. It takes 5 minutes to place a web view that loads a HTML file. And it also allows to provide a fast text formatting.

I know something about it, here’s how the help section on FreakyAlarm looked like:

The correct way

• Task-oriented help. A minimal manual focused on real tasks to get started doing real work.
• Gather the right questions and write clear topics that answer users’ questions.
• Good scanning aids (such as bolding keywords) to increase readability.
• Good user experience with native user interfaces, easy to navigate, easy to read.

For example, as in the last update 1.7:

Problem 1
Software is designed and implemented by nerds, so they have an innate tendency to put settings anywhere. And even if they try to fight their nature, they are also often surrounded by nerdy friends and colleagues that encourage them to add more settings.
Close encounters with members of the second category are very rare. Usability testing is often neglected due to its relatively high demand in time and resources, and the user experience is often evaluated by nerdy friends and colleagues.

Problem 2
Software engineers live in a statistically not significant sample set that doesn’t reflect the actual distribution of world population.
Nerdy users: ~0.1%
Users: ~99.9%

Don’t hide features in the settings. People should be able to find all the available features in your app¹. Avoid providing access to features only in toolbars or under separate tabs. Features should be zero configuration out of the box. Avoid enabling features only via configuration options or switches. Features should always be available within two-three taps. Do not be surprised if you receive a feature request to add a new functionality that you’ve already implemented in the settings. People never look in the settings section, they see it as an engine room that says “do not touch”.

Don’t hide features in the settings. Provide “under the hood” options for advanced users, and they all lived happily ever after.

iOS 6
Evolutionary, not revolutionary. The sixth generation of Apple’s mobile operating system represents an enhanced major release. The improvements are evident in the eyes of the users that will notice new features, new useful options and pixel-perfect finishing touches that are the result of an obsessive attention to detail. The improvements are evident in the eyes of the developers that will finds a ton of awesome APIs (currently under NDA) that they’ll definitely want to start using in their apps.
And requests like Siri support and Notification Center widgets for third-party apps? Inter-app communication? Multitasking rethink? Home screen redesign? Not yet. Apple is focusing on polishing the experience as we know it and creating a mature ecosystem.

Ecosystem
Until two years ago, it seemed that Apple had forgotten Mac OS X, but in reality was just concentrated on building a strong breakthrough mobile platform for the post-PC era. Apple is not losing interest in the Mac platform, but plans to strengthen its ecosystem all together (iOS, OS X and iCloud). A year ago at WWDC 2011, Steve Jobs presented iOS 5 (a huge improvement), Lion (the iOS-ification of OS X) and introduced iCloud (the key element of the ecosystem evolution). In 2012 Apple unveiled Mountain Lion (the unification of iOS and OS X) and announced annual OS X release cadence, just like iOS. Today we see an iCloud-ification of both platforms.

2012
So what? In 2012, the challenge is not to build the most advanced mobile or desktop operating system, but the most advanced ecosystem. Hardware, software and services have never been as integrated as they are today. Amazon and Samsung are creating their own ecosystem on top of Android. Microsoft is behind in the mobile OS market, but its desktop OS still remains the standard for PCs and is preparing the tablet-laptop convergence with the upcoming Windows 8. The post-PC era has just begun, the tablet (the very real Post-PC device) market is just beginning to take off and will be huge, the ecosystem war is under way.

Italian public spending can be compared to a Swiss cheese: full of holes. We are accustomed to deplorable examples of wasteful expenditure such as unnecessary services, abandoned buildings, unemployed resources, invented jobs for relatives and so on.

The new government could no longer remain indifferent to all that is going on, especially in this period of recession. Whether for reasons of necessity, or to calm down an irritated public opinion, Monti has ordered a review of government spending and the operation will be supervised by a new commissioner, Enrico Bondi, who is known for restructuring severely indebted enterprises like Parmalat.

To help this process of spending review, Mario Monti solicited input from the public through the government’s website by asking citizens to highlight waste of public money of which they are aware. Anyone can send recommendations to the government staff through the official website and now through an app for iPhone, “Dillo A Monti” (Tell Monti). The app (designed by Enrico Angelini and Gabriele Di Lorenzo and freely available on iTunes App Store) allows users to send a “letter” to Monti and consult known examples of waste.

The numbers speak for themselves: over 130,000 ideas submitted. This shows how Italians are willing to collaborate and have taken to heart this campaign, and mainly, how crowdsourcing can be useful.

Written by Gloria Lattanzi

Even Italy has awoken, and AppsForItaly – the Italian Open Data competition – is the proof of this. Apps4Italy is a competition open to European citizens, associations, developer communities and firms willing to develop innovative applications based on the re-use of datasets published by Public Sector bodies and capable of showing how relevant is the economic and social potential of public information.

@tweelog and I have decided to participate with an engaging mobile application to allow citizens to have a concrete idea of the costs of the “Auto Blu” (government cars used for official business). It’s a hot issue in the Italian public opinion because represents the symbol of government waste and privilege politics. In 2011 Formez PA has conducted a nationwide survey on behalf of the Ministry of Public Administration to make a census of the car fleet and the data has been explicitly published as Open Data.

✓ Idea
✓ Data
We started working on the idea, defining the screen flow, making mockups, but then we realized (naively too late) that the CSV file of the open data does not include all the information that you can find on the web page where you can do a search among the public bodies which participated in the monitoring and view the responses of the questionnaire. The CSV file contains only a subset of these responses. Some missing information, as address, can be derived while others not so much, as the number of km driven per year. The latter is an essential piece of information that allows to weigh the value of the annual expense necessary for the maintenance of the cars. They provide a data source on the “Auto Blu” expenses without conveying one of the two key elements to evaluate them. What’s the meaning of this? So what’s this for?

I wrote an email to Formez PA and had a response:

Sorry, but it’s not possible at the moment to update the CSV file that, as you rightly note, does not contain all the data collected from the monitoring

Open data? You’re doing it wrong.
Just putting some data online is not enough, data must be significant, reliable and regularly updated.

Pros

Rapid prototyping. Appcelerator’s Titanium actually “accelerate” the application development because allows you to create in a very flexible way, with a few lines of code and in a few hours what normally would require more attention and a few days. Regardless of the choice of developing by using native or cross-platform toolkits, you could always use Titanium to make a prototype to evaluate the user’s interaction with the UI due to its facilitation for rapid development.

Web-oriented. Titanium mainly helps the development when the app interacts with a web service since the application itself is developed by using web technologies. This had a great impact not only on simplifying the development process, but also on saving the overhead needed to elaborate the information exchanged through the remote communication.
A typical example is the use of JSON format for data transfer. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a simple encoding of JavaScript-like objects and Titanium is a pure JavaScript API, so all you have to do is to assign the data received from the network to a local variable without having to write any data parsing, extraction, and conversion (unless there are some unsupported native JSON data types, i.e. dates).

JavaScript. It’s a language many developers know and enables more developers coming from a web development background to get into mobile app development. Most importantly Titanium reflects an intrinsic characteristic of prototype-based scripting languages that is the combination of flexibility and structure.

Cross-platform. This is not an automatic, guaranteed feature. You cannot say something like “write once, run on iOS and Android” (to paraphrase provocatively the well-know Java slogan). It’s therefore necessary to base the development of one of the two platforms and then implement the necessary measures to make the app also runs on the other one. But the advantages are obvious – you don’t have to learn two separate languages and you can reach a very high level of code reusability.

Growing community. Appcelerator has built up a community of 200,000+ developers who have used its cross-platform development tool to build more than 35,000 apps; has launched Open Mobile Marketplace for buying, selling and sharing modules, templates, design elements, extensions for web services; has attracted important investments ($15 million in funding for its Series C round) and has recently acquired Cocoafish to implement cloud services and functionality in its platform. Remarkable. Appcelerator is creating a great platform for a growing community and its best days are ahead of it.

Cons

Increasing complexity. The development complexities (and costs) rise more than proportionally to application complexity increases. The more complex your applications become, the more often you’ll have to deal with, on the one hand technical issues (random crashes, weird behaviors, annoying bugs, etc.), on the other hand a greater effort (code organization, MVC separation, multi-device support, multi-platform support, code readability, etc.).

No Freemium. Appcelerator provides StoreKit, a module to enable In-App Purchase to Apple’s App Store, but it’s a pain. Buggy, poorly documented and it seems to work only partially. Too unstable for production use. Having to renounce the freemium pricing model (apps that are free to download, but require an in-app purchase to be expanded) is not just a minor inconvenience since 72% of total App Store revenue comes from apps featuring in-app purchases.

Toolkit pain. At first there was only Titanium Developer but since last June there is Titanium Studio, an Eclipse-based IDE built on a modified version of Aptana that allows you to manage projects, test your mobile apps in the simulator or on device and automate app packaging. First of all, I sincerely hate Eclipse, yeah, Eclipse is free and the best open source IDE there is, but offers a very poor IDE experience. Most importantly Titanium Studio can go “crazy”, encounter weird glitches, stop printing console messages, but the worst thing is when the build process start to ignore changes. You have to continually clean your project every time you make changes or restart with a brand new project. A productivity tool that is uncomfortable and unstable is not a productivity tool and a development tool that is unproductive is not a development tool.

Flexibility limitations. All that glitters is not gold. At beginning you’ll love the well-defined Titanium API and you will probably love it even more every time you discover a simple property to enable behaviors that would require several lines of code on Xcode. But sooner or later you will face strange bugs and limitations. For example, if you want to apply a cell background gradient to a grouped table (a very common and easy task with Objective-C) you get that the grouped table becomes plain and the gradient color makes the table slow when scrolling, and you will have to use images… So at first you will save a lot of time but as more complex the project grows you’ll lose the saved time in fixing and workarounds.

Laggy. Obviously you can have the most smooth, fast and comfortable user experience possible only with apps developed with a native development environment. This is an obvious observation, but which cannot be omitted. Keep in mind that a Titanium application is the result of an automatic conversion process from web code to native code. Animations are noticeably laggy and apps are not responsive when return from the background. This is particularly evident with Android devices, less evident with iOS devices (especially those with A5 processor).

Conclusion

Just as in everything else, in every design approach, in every technological decision, there are advantages and disadvantages. During these months I have learned to know both and understand the contexts in which it makes sense to bet on Titanium. For simple, small projects Titanium is a good choice but if you’re looking forward to use it on robust apps choose native development environments. I also suggest Titanium as an excellent tool for rapid prototyping to turn within hours a mock-up into a prototype in order to evaluate the consumer interest or conduct usability tests.
However, the pros and cons must be evaluated on a case by case basis because their weight depends on the specific project that you are considering. Keys aspects to take into account are: benefits, costs, budget, development complexity, how necessary is the multi-platform support, how strategic is the project, how important is performance. You have to weigh each pro/con based on your specific priorities to determine what fits your needs the best. Appcelerator’s Titanium is a great option that should always be considered when you start a new project.

Product-based vs. service-based? No, I don’t want to deal with the pros and cons of working for clients vs. working for yourself. Anyone who’s done client work knows the inherent frustrations that come along with that and loves the creative freedom to design and develop projects his own way without any interference from client requirements.

When you work with clients, in any design decision you know that the main goal is to meet the client’s requirements rather than the needs of the end user. And you know that the time factor always win in the trade-off between quality and time. Quick-and-dirty? I guess you know what I mean.
I’ve often heard (and said) phrases like these: “if I had more time, I’d try to do this thing in a different way”, “If I did this thing on my own, I’d do it as I say”, ecc.

Well, I learned a valuable lesson during this project from a friend of mine: you can, you already have the power to do it! You can already apply your point of view.
There is no ideal condition to put your ideas into practice, each situation is the right one to do it!
You will always have to face some kind of constraints (even if you work for yourself), do not wait for the next project to follow this advice, do it now. It works!

Do not complain about your work situation, it falls to you to struggle free and use every available space to gain greater leeway.
“Words mean nothing. Action is the only thing. Doing. That’s the only thing.”. You will not be able to attract your manager by talking about how smart is your proposal, how modular is your approach, how elegant is your solution. Your manager will think only that it will take a long time, he’s attracted only by real things and your proposal is real only in your mind. Just do it! Make it real now!
Work hard behind the front line, surprise your manager and your clients! You just have to do it!

Stop complaining and work hard to change your job.
You can. You already have the power.

This week I attended the iOS Tech Talk in Rome (at the Marriott Park hotel) and it’s been a very exciting chance to learn from Apple and other developers. Here’s a little report on the talks I attended.

9:00-9:50 AM
iOS 5 Tech Talk Kickoff
Recommendations and key insights for iOS 5 development. Examples from Apple Design Award 2011 winners.

Push for excellence, work hard, be creative, exceed expectations. Change things.
Stay hungry! Don’t settle for the status quo.
Stop holding back, move things forward.

10:00-10:50 AM
iPhone and iPad User Interface Design
About the user experience design and best practices for optimizing the user interface for the unique characteristics of iOS devices.
Software analysis according to Apple:

• Tell a great story
• What app do?
• Who are the users?
• Where they will use it?
• How the app will feel?
• Look beautiful!
• Define style of your app (Entertainment vs. Utility)

Recommendations (in open order):

• Reduce visual noise!
• Pay attention on each element
• Design touch centric apps. Focus on touch experience.
• The answer to life the universe and everything is 44 points (comfortable minimum size).
• Some iPhone tips. Cell title: bold, 17 points. Subtitle: 15 points. Preview text: 14 points. Detail body: 15 points.
• Use non integral rows to indicate additional data.
• Don’t hide functionality.
• Focus on determining what is essential.
• Fun UI. Make fun experience for user.
• Customize Game Center.
• Is it Apple quality?
• Software development process according to Apple: prototype and iterate, prototype and iterate, prototype and iterate…
• When you have bad reviews, people may not coming back. Be polished from the beginning.
• Tell a great story!

11:00-11:50 AM
Adopting iCloud Storage — Part 1
Practical understanding of how iCloud storage works and how to take advantage of it. Key-Value Store and UIDocument working with iCloud to store app’s documents.

11:50-1:00 PM (Lunch)

1:00-1:50 PM
Understanding AV Foundation
Introduction to the AV Foundation framework, its core concepts, controls and flexibility.

2:00-2:50 PM
Modernizing Your App Architecture with UIKit
iOS 5 introduces enhancements in UIKit to customize the visual presentation of views and controls using new Appearance APIs. Great talk about how to architect an app to use View Controller containers. Jake Behrens has been the speaker of the day!

3:00-3:50 PM
Modern Tools and Techniques for iOS App Development
Practical understanding of the latest techniques and best practices to get the most out of Xcode 4.2. Interesting demonstration on how Storyboarding can help get from concept to a running app faster than ever.

4:00-4:50 PM
Maximizing Location Awareness on iOS
Geofencing, Core Location framework, region monitoring and geocoding to create a narrowed location-relevant experience for users. Best practices and testing techniques.

5:00-5:50 PM
Your iOS App Performance Hitlist
Make the app feel fastThe best iOS apps are not only beautiful and well designed, they also launch quickly, present a highly responsive interface, and use memory efficiently. Recommendations on the techniques to diagnose and fix common performance problems and the performance hit-list to apply before an app goes out the door.
“Stay safe, stay low”

6:00-7:00 PM (Wine and cheese)

Impeccable organization, interesting technical talks on the newest innovations in iOS 5, the feeling of being for a day at the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), but especially an incomparable chance to talk, exchange views and discuss with other developers.

• …the difference between ‘good enough’ and better
• …that people are at the centre of technology
• …to think first about what is desirable to users and then to consider what’s possible with technology
• …to focus on what truly matters and to keep it simple
• …we can’t connect the dots forward, only backward
• …the difference between a leader and a follower
• …to believe in ourselves and push our life forward
• …to think that we can change the world
• …that “innovation is not about saying yes to everything, it’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features”
• …that design is not just “how it looks like and feels like, design is how it works”
• …not to waste our time living someone else’s life
• …the importance of quality and attention to detail
• …that our imagination can become real through passion and determination
• …to “keep looking, don’t settle”
• …that compromise is a choice, not a requirement
• …to see things differently

We’ll miss you.