The move of the New York Times too going the web app way indicates that some mainstream news sites are thinking of options outside the Apple app ‘ecosystem’. Financial Times has already gone this way and made a great success of it. Makes sense, considering that a large number of readers get thier news using…
MOBILE & TABLETS
Web apps or native apps – which way to go?
In the media context, it’s generally thought that both Web and native apps both have their respective roles to play in bringing content to readers, but if the experience of Financial Times is anything to go by the dice seems to be loaded in favour of Web apps. A recent post in the Guardian’s Apps…
News sites take note: Web apps will triumph in the long run says usability expert
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s recent prediction that mobile-optimized web sites will have the edge over mobile apps in the long run, has some implications for news sites. The mobile apps vs mobile sites or browser-based apps issue is a tricky one that all sites have to deal with. As Mr Nielsen observes, building device-specific apps…
Media organizations need to sort out their app problems
About 45 per cent of the iPad apps of magazines and newspapers evaluated sometime last year had glitches said a report in AdAge Mediaworks; it said that the single biggest problem was authentication failure (the apps couldn’t recognize existing print subscribers). This apart, the were other problems as well: "Pages, video and audio can fail…
Neat emulators to check out your mobile news site
Whether you are in the business of creating or managing mobile sites or not, you might want to check how your site or a particular story is displayed on a particular device – and considering the bewildering array of tablets and phones that are being used these days for accessing content, it might appear a…
Best practices for mobile web apps – a great checklist for news sites
The W3C, which formulates and publishes web specifications, has come up with a new list of best practices for those interested in developing mobile web applications – that is applications that work within the framework of mobile web browsers. Considering that news apps delivered on different platforms are the rage these days, these practices will…
Disasters and the upsurge in the quest for news on differnet devices
How do disasters impact the flow of traffic to news sites, especially the mobile platform? Opera has come up with this graphic which analyzes how mobile traffic to different sites changed in the wake of the Japan earthquake. Starting from March 10, the day before the earthquake, through March 15 the user stats for Opera…
Should news sites think as much about mobile browsers as they do about apps
Apps are the darling of media organizations these days, as they devise ways of exploiting the explosive growth in the use of the mobile platform, but then, sould their mobile strategy be all about creating native apps for different devices and serving up content on those? It’s a tough call because the proliferation of mobile…
Extended mobile web best practices guidelines could prove pretty useful for news sites
The W3C, the international body that formulates web standards, has come up with a set of extended mobile web best practices guidelines, that could prove particularly handy to news sites because of the range of content they deliver to different kinds of mobile devices. The W3C had come up with a set of guidelines in…
EMMA all set to make Web user interaction more diverse
The W3C recently published a new standard called EMMA that facilitates diverse forms of user interaction, apart from those provided by the keyboard and mouse. EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language, makes it possible to develop rich Web applications that will accept different kinds of inputs like speech, handwriting and gestures and provide the…
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