vfr.org | Scito te ipsum iOS Newsstand Tutorial - Viggiosoft Blog A new way to distribute magazines Since the beginning of the iPad era, one of the most appreciated features in the tablet has been the possibility to read magazines and newspapers. Practically all major publishers (and a lot of minor) have created their own magazine and newspaper apps and the first in-house experiments have grown with increasingly better applications. While Apple in the time applied several regulations, e.g. limiting the possibility to purchase issues outside the In App Purchase system, or introducing a subscription mechanism, it behaved before iOS 5 mainly as an observer, limiting its own participation in the app arena with the iBooks app, dedicated to books. So how a Newsstand app differ from other apps? Besides an app that decides to live behind the Newsstand umbrella will benefit of background downloading of new issues and the device can be informed, and proceed with automatic download eventually, of new issue by receiving special push notifications. Basic app
vfr/Reader App Store-safe Page Curl animations Update February 22, 2013: Please do not use the code I present in this article anymore. The iOS SDK has progressed tremendously since I wrote this post in 2010, and now provides a native implementation of the page curl gesture/animation in the form of UIPageViewController. This API is a lot more flexible and easier to use than the Leaves project discussed here. Even if its usefulness is questionable, the page curl has become one of the signature effects of Apple’s iOS devices so it is no surprise that many developers would like to implement this effect in their apps. iBooks on the iPad doing a page curl The problem is that the page curl animation used by Apple is not exposed in a public and documented API. I hope Apple makes this public in the future (and if you want to have it, too, you should file a bug and request it). The end result is not quite as stunning as Apple’s solution but it is a very good workaround. Page curl in the Leaves project in side-by-side view