Journal /

The Guardian has released there new iPad app which has done exceptionally well, looking at the ratings on iTunes. Currently sitting at 4.5 out of 5 stars, it really does hold it’s ground in the digital publishing market. I have tried and experienced many digital journals on the iPad, not limited too Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, and others. And it seems to me that they struggle with trying to reproduce the newspaper on the iPad, when really they can’t stop there.

The experience from these different news paper publishers is beyond amazing, some ranging back hundreds of years. But now that the iPad is here, some knowledge can be pulled from news paper and journals, but one must think more critically about how to revolutionize the way we read and process digital publications. It’s not a newspaper.

The app is very intelligent. Unlike the iPhone and Android apps, which are built on feeds from the website, the Guardian iPad app actually recycles the already-formatted newspaper pages.

Guardian developed a script within the app that analyses InDesign files from the printed paper and pulls from various parameters like page number, physical area and position that a story occupies, headline size, and image size to assign a value to the story. The content is then automatically rebuilt according to those values in a new InDesign template for the app. Pretty Amazing isn’t it?

You should download it: Guardian iPad Edition for iPad