According to a post over at Infinity Quad, RIT’s Print Media lab will be selling its in-house printing press. What this means for The Reporter, which relies heavily on the in-house press to stay afloat in its current all-color format, isn’t immediately clear. Whatever it means, it likely isn’t good for the future of every RIT student’s favorite magazine. It’s an unfortunate sign of the times, but it also presents a silver lining in handing an opportunity for The Reporter to re-invent itself as a 21st century publication on the digital landscape. Now the work of the talented staff there can finally shine on a much larger scale; the acerbic, often irreverent humor that’s become The Reporter’s trademark over the years can find a much broader audience than simply those students who remain on campus. Plus, I know for a fact that there’s a whole department of New Media Designers who would jump at the chance to design a Reporter online app….
Who else would’ve come up with such crazy tech, especially so far ahead of their competitors? Sure, they’re still technically in the arcade hardware business, but that industry is a shadow of what it once was. Without a home console, SEGA can’t bring cutting-edge tech like 3D glasses to home audiences, a’la the most awesome game to play when drunk ever made?
I read an interesting article over at TUAW this morning, chronicling a digital magazine’s decision to nix its native iPad app in favor of an HTML5-based web app. First off, I was impressed because the magazine, Blackline, is a satirical magazine. God knows we could use more humor on the dry, banal Apple Newsstand. Second, the article speculates that this could be the beginning of a trend in which publishers begin to recode their native apps in favor of web-based issues.
It makes perfect sense for online magazine developers, and app developers in general, to want to move away from dedicated apps. After all, “porting” a web app for compatibility between devices is a hell of a lot different than actually going in and recoding a native app from scratch for those same platforms. Not to mention the fact that it liberates the content producer from having to navigate the choppy and inconsistent waters of each platform’s app submission process.
Hopefully we will see a migration of more developers away from native apps, as HTML5 standards become more, well, standard across browsers and devices. God knows I’d rather be working in HTML than in C++.
What Is?
Hey! I'm Mike, this is my blog. and my dream is to use my middling tech skills to make the world a better place (not in the techno-libertarian, "the world is a better place if I get mine" sense, but in the actual, "I want to help" sense).
