In today’s fast and ever changing world of digital publishing solutions, it is increasingly important to keep up to date with all the new developments from your software provider. This has now become significantly easier.
In this new monthly blog post, I will describe the new features and new functionality launched from us each month that will benefit you as a media company, your advertisers and your readers.
An update for each platform – iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and web – will be published once a month. Subscribe to this blog to keep yourself up to date with the latest news.
Lots of exciting new things hit the streets in April. Here are some of the highlights.
Doubled picture quality or halved download size on iOS
As part of our continuous focus on optimizing file formats, we have released a great new feature. By using a new Google picture format called WebP, we have managed to halve the size of newspapers and magazines in the app. You can choose whether to use the extra space to noticeably improve the picture quality for ads, comics and pictures, or to keep the download size to a minimum.
New event for Google Analytics
We have a new way to track the usage of a single publication. Instead of relying on Google’s predefined visit scope and the somewhat uncertain timeout period, we have implemented a new Publication event on all platforms. It will tell you how many times a certain issue has been read and for exactly how long. This will increase accuracy and make it easier to compare data across apps and the web.
Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development restarts
After a bumpy start, development for the two Windows platforms has now finally restarted. A combination of increased staffing and tight collaboration with Microsoft certified developers has moved the apps to a new and much improved level of quality. A full implementation of Google Analytics, interstitials and clickable ads has upped the number of features in the apps. The Finnish paper Hufvudstadsbladet, or eHBL, has released a new version of the app for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.
Some visible changes on web
A small but popular feature has been introduced for the web reader. Your readers can now browse through all articles in the article view window by clicking back and forward buttons.
On the HTML5 reader, searching the archive has now been enabled. This is great news if you wish to make your archive available to your readers – they can now make extensive searches on the HTML5 version as on the other platforms.
DYNAMIC – the new kid in class
Along with all the upgrades and improvements, we have released the culmination of two years’ research: DYNAMIC. It is not just another platform – it is a new reading convention. As a strong, modern companion to the replica newspaper reading convention, DYNAMIC fully automatically transforms articles from a newspaper into a template-based view optimized for tablets and smartphones, which lives alongside the replica version available from a toggle button. Interstitials have now been implemented and many more improvements are due. Watch the video below to see a presentation of DYNAMIC and the process leading to the release of this new kid in class.
Mathias Winther Klausen, Product Manager
