I'm a student in charge of my university's magazine, and I'm interested in finding a user and budget friendly solution to distributing a tablet version on Apple's Newsstand.
I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I can follow a tutorial – is there a simple framework that I'd be able to train people how to use? I've noticed some apps are basically glorified PDF viewers with no frills. That would be good enough for us – we're not looking to do anything special, we're just looking to do something.
I have an iOS developer account, and we might be able to invest in some software – but paying an outside company a subscription to do it for us would be a little harder to justify, especially if it's too expensive, because all of our budget decisions go through a bureaucratic meat grinder.
For reference – we do pretty much everything on InDesign. Unfortunately, we can't fit Creative Cloud Professional memberships in the budget (not even one).
To boil it down: are there any solutions out there that are friendly to english and journalism majors? Or are there any companies who offer educational discounts to organisations like ours who might be able to help?
Best Answer
Newsstand requires building an actual iOS application, albeit a simple one. I'm not sure an English major could manage that (he says, who was once a professional computer programmer and English major).
You might be better to consider iBooks. Check out https://developer.apple.com/ibooks/
You can download iBooks Author for free in the Mac App store to build extremely nice iBooks and they can then be put into the bookstore if you have a developer account. You might then email all your subscribers with a link to grab the new issue. iBooks Author is almost as much fun to use a InDesign and certainly more fun than Pages.
If you are convinced to go the Newsstand route then I suggest you find an iOS programmer who can assist you. You will need a good understanding of the iOS WebKit framework (as the most likey way to handle your content), the Newsstand framework and the push framework at an absolute minimum. Once you have the app coded and running then the difficulty of creating an issue depends on exactly how you decide to handle it in your app. The app gets passed the issue as a bundle and how it deals with it is entirely up to your app.