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| Morrisons Magazine - The first Pad edition |
First supermarket iPad magazine
UK supermarket, Morrisons, has become the first to launch an iPad app of its consumer magazine. The grocers seems to be following in the footsteps of the online store, Ocado, which has an iPad app focusing on lifestyle along with a mobile commerce function enabling users to shop through the application, however Morrisons is the first supermarket to actually break into Apple's Newsstand.
The launch of the digital magazine last month, coincides with the redesign of the traditional Morrisons Magazine, both of which feature a vibrant and revamped front cover. "The magazine has been a tremendous success for Morrisons over the years and our new magazine looks stunning," says Richard Lancaster, corporate marketing and operations director at Morrisons.
"Interactive replicas" are rarely interactive!
Not all digital magazines have quite realised the potential of tablets and in particular, Apple's Newsstand. All too often I see simple, standard replications of print editions, without any thought of how to push the potential of these intelligent pieces of technology. Almost a year working in the mobile industry and I become really bored with the unimaginative digital editions of magazines dubbed "Interactive Replicas" which seem like scanned copies and have no multi-channel innovation whatsoever.
When BBC Good Food added to its already extensive digital portfolio with a magazine on the Newsstand, I can honestly say I was super impressed. This was a magazine which was actually interactive. It used all of the technical elements of the device to include buttons, some which swivelled pages into recipe cards, others that played videos or took you to online content, and pages that adjusted when rotating the device from portrait to landscape mode.
However, at £15.99 for a six month subscription, I expect this level of innovation... Enter Morrisons Magazine - a FREE digital edition which shows up most of the other titles sitting on the "replica" pine shelves of Apple's Newsstand.
A fantastic debut from Morrisons
Like Good Food, Morrisons Magazine jumps off the page, both visually through luscious photography and literally through animations as you swipe through the pages. It seamlessly flows from one page to the next, and rotates easily when changing the orientation of the tablet.
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| A 'How to' page highlights how to take full advantage of the digital magazine |
The 38 pages, produced by Result Customer Communications, are delightfully interactive and I love how each page has lively entry points, and how it uses the device to take the reader to additional windows as if you were reading from a website. The magazine is also brimming with recipes, features and digital content which makes it feel like a magazine and less like a common recipe application.
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| The news page at the beginning of the magazine is clean, bright and offers the reader the option of discovering more by touching an expandable image |
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| Additional content following a reader touching an item on the news page |
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| Even the adverts are interactive, featuring video content and social media links to become as multi-channel as possible |
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| Landscape mode... |
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| Pages automatically resize and change layout when changing orientation back and forth |
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| Recipe pages are clean and vivid, while making use of thoughtful gadgets such as a kitchen timer, "cook mode" and "add to shopping list" feature |
However, you can't expect all pilots to be perfect the first time around, and I did notice a few negatives. My biggest disappointment was the lack of a contents page, which makes the issue quite difficult to navigate, the edition also takes a while to download because of all the multimedia content, and can also come across as very "powerpointy" - with animated images zooming across the screen every time you turn a page, which started to make me feel a little dizzy after a while!
On the whole this is one of the best attempts at a digital magazine I have seen, and being available for free on iTunes, makes this a dream addition to any foodie's tablet - proof that innovation in mobile technology is doable at a (more than!) reasonable cost.
Apologies to readers who are unable to get there hands on a digital edition, but my love of food and technology has taken over here. Well done Morrisons on a great job - I hope you can keep it going!
