Apple just made it redonkulously easy to put your alumni magazine on the iPad
Apple just made it redonkulously easy to put your alumni magazine on the iPad – and best of all, they did it for free.
First, let me back up a second.
I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately from vendors wanting to make me an app version of my University’s alumni magazine. The magazine apps I’ve seen have been mostly flip-book PDF style apps and they’re expensive to create and maintain.
While driving home in the snow last night, I had a realization. Yesterday, Apple released new software called iBooks Author, free software that will allow people to create multimedia rich books that can be read in the free iBooks app on the iPad.
The light went off. While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it.
So, last night, I did it. I downloaded iBooks Author and in 15 minutes had a story laid out including photos, an interactive slide show and dynamic image with hot spots and text.
The application is super simple to use, easier than Word, and creating the dynamic elements is very easy. Here’s the interface, I had a few extra guides turned on.
As you work, you can preview your work on an actual iPad, if you have one. You connect it, and a proof shows up in your iBooks 2 app. You can then scroll through the pages in the real app, interact with the elements, highlight, take notes and so on.
This just changed the game.
I made an iBook in half an hour. Imagine if I spent an hour on it.
If I’m not charging for my magazine iBook, and I imagine many institutions wouldn’t, you can distribute the file on your website. If you want to sell it, you’ve got to go through Apple (and they’ll take their 30% cut, thank you very much.)
iBooks Author requires a Mac running OS 10.7.
While meant for K-12 and textbooks, I think they’ve given us higher ed folks a nice present as well.
Is this taking social media marketing too far?
I’m a fan of filmmaker Joe Carnahan. He’s made some good films (NARC), over-the-top movies (Smoking Aces) and big Hollywood movies (The A-Team.) His newest movie, The Grey, comes out in a few weeks and looks interesting. Here’s a quick synopsis from IMDB:
In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.
I was watching a trailer for the film, and was surprised to see the end credits for the trailer:
and this:
I can’t decide if this kind of social media marketing is genius or dumb.
What is the marketing gain for this movie if I tweet something with the hashtag #MickeyLiddell? Will that influence my social circle to go see this film?
Free Facebook Timeline Header Photo Template
I’ve been trying out the new Facebook timeline feature for my profile since before the holiday break. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, there are things I like about it and things I don’t. I like the header design, and the fact that you can get a lot of information about a persion in a quick glance. Below the fold, so to speak, it goes a bit pear-shaped. It’s tough, when scrolling quickly, so see what’s newly posted and what’s older.
Some items are pinned to a center line with a dot, signifying their timing, but other boxes seem to float, such as the friends box and other information, such as recent tracks I’ve played in Spotify.
Anyways, as you can see above, one of the key parts of the Facebook timeline profile is the header graphic, which is something you can select. I must have gone through a dozen photos until I found the right one. In the end, I ended up tweaking it quite a bit in Photoshop to get it to fit just right. My photo is one I took when I was in Cardiff, Wales in 2009.
I would guess that in the next few months, as these become more prevalent across Facebook, we’ll see them start to roll out to fan pages as well. I’m not sure how the timeline will work for brands, as I think some of the display of information on these pages can get a bit confusing.
Despite that, when the time comes I thought we’d all want to customize that header for our brands/colleges/universities/whatever, so I created a Photoshop document template all set up and ready for you to design with. I laid out the “notch” where your profile picture is inserted by Facebook so you can make sure text or other graphical elements that are important aren’t being covered up.
If you’d also like, here’s a torrent version.
