SCREENSHOTS | The ABC gave us an in-depth look at their soon-to-be released iPad app.
We were excited to be invited to ABC Innovation to get a first look at the Auntie's very-soon-to-be-released iPad app. Mobile Producer Manuela Davidson took us through the app.
Davidson told us ABC had been planning its iPad app before Steve Jobs even announced the iPad, because it seemed such a sure thing that Apple was going to release a tablet-sized "iDevice", and it was clear this would be a great way to provide ABC content to people. The decision to give the project the go-ahead was made at the highest executive levels of the ABC on January 26, when Jobs announced the iPad.
The main app homepage shows ABC TV shows and vodcasts organised in categories such as news, entertainment and TV, with horizontally scrolling film-strips and the two newest pieces of content in the featured boxes above.
At the top right of the screen, there's a weather forecast for the day, showing minimum and maximum location. You can have different locations set in the app and switch between them (and, yes, the app will sense your location and find the nearest weather forecast using Apple's location services.)
So what would you see if you tapped on "browse news?"...
A very similar interface to the app's main home screen, with scrolling film-strips. The app aggregates video reports as well as ABC online news.
Radio streams are on the roadmap – Davidson says the ABC is absolutely aware of how important it is to modernise the streaming standards for its online radio service to work with a wider range of devices, and the broadcaster has a project underway to switch from the tired WMA and Real Audio streaming formats to a standard technology such as MP3 or AAC. The project group is currently looking at the best standards in terms of compression quality vs device compatibility vs future support and so on.
If you tap on a particular news item -- in this case an article -- you get this screen:
In the first release of the app, you won't be able to zoom in on pictures, but this functionality will follow soon after in an update release.
The popup nav bar down the bottom lets you go to other stories directly, and you can also swipe the whole page left and right to read stories sequentially.
This is the vodcast section of the app, which lets you view all of ABC's content that is downloadable in a vodcast format. Currently, the app doesn't provide iView content, but ABC has a project working on bringing that to the iPad and other devices that don't support Flash as well.
To take advantage of the iPad's 1024x768 screen resolution, the ABC has upgraded its streaming video resolution from 320x180 to 512x288, which provides a much sharper full screen player view. It's not doing full 1024x768 resolution because that requires a bit rate that's higher than 3G (and poorer speed home broadband) can handle.
Entertainment is a permanently featured item up the top of the vodcast section, because ABC is keen for the app not to be considered just a news viewer. Its iPhone app showed strong demand for entertainment -- for example, the fourth most viewed vodcast is Goodgame, even though it's not available for streaming over 3G like the news videos are.
This is the video view page -- you can scale videos up to full-screen.
ABC did the design of the app in-house, but outsourced the coding to a development company called 2Ergo. The ABC also consulted with a user interface/experience company, called Mobile Experience, which helped plan a UI (before Apple even announced the iPad), and then adapted it to the iPad OS.
In the second major version of the app, ABC is looking to include free-to-air TV EPGs, app-wide search functionality, as well as personalisation (excluding all sports content for example!)