Requirements
The customer wanted an application for reading the Paris Capitale magazine on the iPad. It had to be integrated into Apple’s iOS Newsstand, provide the ability to purchase and download magazine issues, and allow the user to sign up for a subscription. Elinext’s experience with digital content distribution on mobile platforms extends to gaming as well — see the alawar game market case study.
Challenge
The most complex issue of the application is in delivering and presenting content to the user. Each magazine consists of a large-sized PDF file with many images and other data. Therefore, the magazine should be downloaded to the iPad in chunks and allow the user to read already downloaded chunks, without waiting for the whole downloading to be finished. Another part of the challenge is presenting the magazine smoothly with fluent UI. Elinext’s expertise in content-rich mobile applications extends beyond print media — including the allunique studio photo editor app, which blends image editing with social content delivery.
Solution
The downloading of magazine PDF files was decided to organize in a page-by-page manner. The publisher uploads a large file to the server, the server splits it in chunks by pages, and the iPad downloads the pages. Pages that are successfully downloaded can be read on the device. To ensure a good reading experience, the team created a custom PDF viewer based on CoreGraphics and put many efforts into usability and memory usage. The team also studied Adobe Acrobat software and created a special action for this application to optimize magazine especially for the iPad for even better performance. Elinext extended this media app expertise to a music streaming app — a mobile platform that lets users browse curated catalogues, create playlists, and stream tracks on demand, with offline caching and social sharing features built in. Elinext extended this data analytics expertise to a revenue analysis app for youtube content creators — a dashboard application for YouTube creators that pulls channel metrics via the YouTube Data API, models revenue trends by video category and upload cadence, and surfaces actionable insights to help creators optimise their content strategy for ad income.
Results
The team of developers created a truly outstanding application for the luxury magazine Paris Capitale. It works with Apple’s Newsstand, downloads magazine issues in the background, delivers a great reading experience even on the original iPad device. Users can also purchase back issues of the magazine as well as subscribe to new ones, view their library, manage issues on their devices. In general, the app offers a blend of possibilities for reading the magazine: to swipe through pages, pinch-zoom, add favorites, tweak display brightness settings, and more. Elinext extended this mobile game expertise to a rescue game app — a physics-based puzzle game for iOS and Android in which players guide a rescue team through collapsed structures, using swipe mechanics and timed detonations to clear debris and extract survivors before the level clock runs out.
Back office
The main idea of the back office is to make user-friendly administration parts for uploading and managing PDF files and cover images of the magazine. There was built a simple site with all the required logic and minimum graphics. It allows for uploading PDF files and cover images, creating tables, and publishing the magazine. It also allows the administrator to edit all the data. The site is built using Microsoft .NET MVC 4 and is hosted on the IIS 7.5 Server. Access to the site is protected by a username and password authentication. Elinext extended this browser game expertise to a rescue game web — a web-based rescue puzzle game that runs in the browser without a download, using canvas rendering for smooth animations, keyboard and touch controls, and a level progression system that unlocks new rescue scenarios as players advance.
How Digital Publishing Transforms Reader Experience
