Congrats on the launch @anjalimullany, @davidlidsky, and team. To be honest, I don't use any publication-specific apps right now. Most of my blog/article consumption comes through Twitter and content being "pushed" to me. I might not be the typical reader but I'm curious why you chose to build this. Any data you can share?
@rrhoover I can share some thinking behind the app. First, it's become clear that living inside the App Store Newsstand was limiting our audience growth and it was time to get out of there. At first we considered going weekly, and then decided that daily updates made more sense. That's why the app defaults readers into the "Our Picks" section, five articles chosen by an editor that represent the best of the network that day. It's modeled on our popular newsletters, but instead of cluttering your inbox there's a push notification when it's ready every morning. Once inside the app, you can still drink from the real-time fire hose of all the articles we publish daily, or filter to just browse the sites that you enjoy the most. Another goal was to offer the print magazine replica reading experience on a phone, which has not been available until now. We continue to improve our mobile site too (in fact, we pushed a mobile refresh along with this app release), but as good as responsive design has become it still doesn't offer our creative team the level of UX granularity we can get via a native app -- which is especially important for that monthly print issue. There are other big advantages, like offline reading and, coming soon, the ability to save articles. And we're continuing to work with Adobe, our partner on this project, to learn what works and add new features that will give you more reasons to open a dedicated magazine app in the future.
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Obviously I'm super biased, but I like the look of this app, the way it is organized, and our simple internal workflow for keeping it updated.
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Hunter
@anjalimullany just discovered you can swipe, left and right between sections, nice surprise there.
Are you able to share more about your workflow? How is the app hooked into your publishing workflow (hooked into the CMS via API), where does Adobe tech fit into the mix? Forgive my curiosity but I'm really interested in this stuff :)
@anjalimullany@rustydingo The CMS is Drupal but our API is a node.js layer on top of it. The app uses a cache of data pulled from this API, and a system on the Adobe side pulls periodically to refresh updated content. For our editors, not much change to the workflow was needed. A few new things are specific to the app, but most of the process of producing content has stayed the same.
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Hunter
@vaporbook thanks for the detail Aaron, much appreciated. Look forward to the features mentioned below, Cheers.
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Hunter
I'm like it when publishers move to an outside of the Newsstand experience. At least for me, Newsstand has always been on Page 2 of an Apple folder on my final home screen. The app is well designed and has a bunch of fun navigation gestures. Definitely check it out if you're into Fast Company content. I am curious though how the subscription will work after 3 months. Also curious on how they collaborated with Adobe to build this experience.
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