woodwing

Yesterday was an exciting day.

For Apple fans with the release of iOS5 and iPhone 4S. For publishers even more so with the launch of the Apple Newsstand.

With the Newsstand magazines and newspapers now have their own shelf on your iPad homescreen. This means they no longer they have to compete for a space on your homescreen with Angry Birds and the other 140,000 iPad Apps. Even more important is the automatic download and notification. When you are subscribed to a title your new issues will be delivered automatically on your iPad. Like the good old days of print when your issues where delivered to your doorstep.

We're happy to see many WoodWing customers appearing in the Newsstand at launch. From the Americas I saw titles such as Car and Driver, Motor Trend Magazine, Once Magazine and multiple titles from Meredith: Better Homes & Gardens, Parents Magazine and Fitness Magazine. European titles such as VG Helg, Klick (Aftonbladet) and Corriere dello Sport (daily newspaper publishing 4 regional editions every day) and Asian titles such as PhotoJ etc.

Now it's the day after, so let's explore what Apple can (and should) improve to make this great concept even better.

If I jump to the Newsstand store using my Dutch iTunes account I have 218 titles to choose from. Either I can browse thru some (lucky) highlighted titles or I can go thru the complete list sorted on release date. On the first row I see Autoweek, displayed with the Dutch category Nieuws. Clicking gives a disappointment: it's not the Dutch interactive Autoweek, but an English static PDF Autoweek. Taking a good look: no Dutch titles at all on this first page. Going back to the highlights page: there is one Dutch title (the newspaper AD) rotating in the banner, but no other Dutch titles on the first page. There is the Swedish Macworld on the first page though, wonder how many Dutch will pick this up....

So no other way than browsing thru 19 pages of titles. And whenever I see an international Brand it looks to be Dutch with the Dutch category label to only learn it's not Dutch after clicking on it.

With this many titles on launch date I'm sure the newsstand becomes a big sucess with many, many more titles. So soon we'll have an endless amount of pages to scroll thru, which makes it even more important to have proper filters:

• Language (and ensure in the approval process that the content is in that language and not just the 3 words in the App UI)
• Category

And while workin on this, please also add some other fields to allow faceted search on sub-category, age category, frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), interactive (vs 'no thank you, static')

Looking forward to see these iTunes improvements. I'm sure it will drives sales, making both Publishers and Apple happy.

PS. For those who wonder: Adobe's DPS offers Newsstand support, see Adobe DPS blog