The world of iPhone & iPad is dangerously seductive. It’s easy to get drawn into a months-long development process to build an app filled with swipes, taps, and an array of gestures for controlling the interface. Resist that urge. Resist trying out all sorts of variations in the interface. (Explore those in prototyping tools, not in real test versions of the app.) Keep it simple. Users appreciate that.

And simple gets your app to market faster. The reality is that most apps sell very few copies unless you have a solid marketing campaign in place. As with any form of publishing there are few blockbusters in the world of apps. If you’re aiming for a successful app, have funding for four to six months of development, along with six months of marketing. Start marketing while the app is still in development.

A mentality of build it and they will come is naive. With that atitude your app will sell only a few copies on its first day of release. The app store gold rush is long over. Further, there’s no longer a bump in sales for new apps appearing in the new releases of the app store. Apple proudly cites hundreds of millions of users with credit card numbers on file with iTunes. But people are not going to find you through the app store alone. Your own marketing has to bring them.

For the last year a side venture of mine has revolved around the creation of travel guides for iPhone (and its sibling the iPod Touch). As with many startups, most of our early efforts were consumed with organizing, planning, and prototyping. In August we finally launched Endless Mile.

Our first title is the specialized guidebook Recoleta Cemetery in app and e-book formats. Endless Mile guides do not aim to encompass everything that a tourist needs to know about a city. We’re not setting out to compete with Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Time Out, Frommer’s, Rick Steves, or any of the other major guidebook publishers. Our guides, selling for a just a few dollars each, are intended to supplement those standard resources (as well as non-traditional tools such as TripAdvisor. We don’t provide lists of hotels, restaurants, or even an exhaustive listing of sights to see. We leave that to others.

Instead, we offer destinations in context. Our guides appeal to curious travelers who want to understand why a particular building is historic or why a spot is considered a landmark. Our digital guidebooks serve as a companion for your journey, as well as a way to remember your visit and share the memory with others.

Why not just Wikipedia?

A significant number of travel apps derive their content from Wikipedia. And the blogosphere is filled with reviews praising the wonders of wondering around a city looking at whatever you like and learning about that spot from Wikipedia. We certainly encourage wandering even though our apps provide a more curated experience of a city. (My business partner in Endless Mile is a long-time tour guide for Rick Steves, so there’s a strongly guided focus to what we offer.) I use Wikipedia all the time to get a gloss on a subject but the sterile writing style forced upon entries in Wikipedia leaves me yearning for a more engaging read. For travel destinations that’s where Endless Mile fills the gap between encyclopedia article and a full-length book on the topic. And, in some cases, such as with our own app on Recoleta Cemetery: there is no other in-depth coverage in any language, in any format, than what we provide.

Perspectives of a developer turned publisher

In a series of posts I’ll be sharing my experience with developing apps and e-books. Topics to be covered include soft launching a first app, utilizing the same content for app and ebooks, establishing a publisher as a developer on the iTunes app store, building an engine as a template for producing multiple apps, offline vs online mapping, app marketing and the web, designing a five-star app, and more.

My daughter Mila, born on the second day of this year, will grow up in an era dominated by multi-touch tablets, with ever decreasing thickness and ever increasing capabilities. (Her adulthood likely will be spent with even more flexible devices for consuming information.) Eagerly I will introduce her to reading. Already she hears my voice babbling as I read aloud what she will one day read for herself. Her generation, however, is poised to encounter the stories of the world in manners that are as yet only partially known.

She will come of age in a time when writing is not simply textual (though the careful use of words will persist…must persist). The world of 2030, when Mila is in college, will view one form of writing as a composition elegantly mixing many elements, among which will be words, images, sound, and video. A critical aspect in the coming decades is that the careful use and mixture of those elements must exist.

What do we call these compositions?

Those are not the books we cherish today Those are not e-books. They most definitely are not enhanced e-books. Neither are they documentaries. Technically, the compositions will be contained in some type of app. Maybe they’re just websites. Ultimately, they’re simply stories: narratives for examining the themes that engage civilization, compositions through which we learn and share our experiences of the lives around us.

(And the twenty-first century form of storytelling is as much about the reader as it is about the author.)

A word loosely tossed around these days by media companies is content. Content is often defined by the container. Book necessitates text, perhaps joined by the occasional image. What about other containers? For instance, documentary films necessitate motion images joined with voice-over narration. With the iPad possibilities exist for a hybrid exhibiting capabilities not found in either print or film.

Feeding the reading space of 2030, through whatever magical hardware brand dominates the delivery of digital media, will be apps that are hybrids of books and documentaries.

If we think of the iPad, though, as supporting a new genre then we should step back to examine the whole experience of reading, even asking what is non-fiction? (For the sake of this discussion I leave fiction for another day.) Why do people read and spend time with non-fiction books? Ultimately, I suspect the answer revolves around learning. The desire to learn prompts us to read and, preferably, have an enjoyable experience while doing so. Similarly, that desire to learn in a satisfying manner drives us to view documentaries.

The challenge is in exploring how to leverage the tablet platform for storytelling. The iPad brings a new way of reading. Likewise, it carries forward a new way of writing.

While the publishing community scrambles for today’s solutions, the real burden is on all of us to ensure that tomorrow’s writers & editors understand the elements of style required for creating the publications that will dominate the mid-century. My daughter will be less than forty years of age in 2050. Aspects of the world will be unthinkably different then. Much will remain the same, but the way humans communicate through media will continue its long trajectory. Perhaps what we’re doing now with apps will someday appear as quaint as magic lanterns or the early years of cinema. Undoubtedly, the techniques of writing and composition in a tablet-based digital environment will evolve with time, eventually forming accepted practices that support different types of reading experiences.

Developing native apps for Apple’s iOS devices (currently: iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) is certainly a complex process. Of course, that’s true for almost anything worthwhile. Fortunately, app developers are usually the type accustomed to learning new tools & skills. Back when I managed technology in universities, I hired programmers based on not what they knew but on their aptitude and skills for learning. And I still think that’s valid for hiring developers on salary to work in-house, but I suspect most publishers will contract their app development to firms specializing in those skills.

While there is a significant learning curve for new app developers, Apple provides an extensively documented environment for building apps. The learning curve is about three months to obtain a firm understanding of developing apps in Objective C and Apple’s SDK (known as Xcode). Clearly, though, the learning of new techniques and more involved aspects of the iOS SDK is an ongoing and never ending process. Again, that’s also true for any development environment.

Some sort of programming background is essential for coming to terms with the tools for iOS app development. Experience in a C-based language is helpful but not necessary, though having a basic understanding of how a programming language functions is essential. Those with only a background in scripting languages such as PHP or JavaScript will have a slightly harder time but not so much harder. Personally, I actually find Objective C a lot simpler to understand that JavaScript but that might simply be the way my own mind is wired.

Developing a native app requires a very different mindset than developing for the Web. The screen dimensions is only one aspect. Apple provides great guidance in its interface guidelines. And there are many technical issues. You must deal with memory management. Xcode provides both an iPhone & iPad simulator but what works on the simulator may not work on the actual device, which has much stricter memory limitations than a desktop machine. The complexity of loading views (i.e., a screen of information) is not nearly as simple as making an href link to a new Web page. In iOS a lot more is going on behind the scenes. Of course, that also opens up a great deal of functionality, features, and capabilities that can be presented in a native app.

Knowing how to take advantage of those features in native apps requires an understanding of the possibilities presented by iOS. And that’s where the design of the app is so very important, and not just the visual, graphic design but the underlying structure and functionality of the app. The value of an app rests in the functionality, which really needs to be something more than a page curl animation. That’s merely eye candy. The task of conceptualizing an app is the most difficult part of working in Apple’s app world. But that’s nothing new. System analysis and design always has been more difficult than programming.

As a book design studio we have focused on designing covers and complex layouts for print. We’re continuing to do print design. Actually, that is Ceci’s specialty. But we’re adding a new specialization: the design of mobile apps. One might even say “books as apps”, but that’s not quite right.

I’m not exactly talking e-books or even enhanced e-books (as those are variously defined). Certainly, there is a demand and need for e-books based on a reflow format (e.g., EPUB) and also for digital facsimiles of print books (e.g., PDFs). No need to debate that issue any further, though I’m not quite sure about enhanced e-books where audio or video is simply stuck inside a long-form narrative or tacked onto the end.

The work that consumes most of my time these days involves stepping back and thinking about the structure and presentation of content on smart phones and tablets without staying within the traditional concept of a book. Indeed, the book as app is not a book at all, but a variation on materials and capabilities where the end result is a compelling product that people want to buy.

Stay tuned for a lot more on this topic.