Foreach digitally remasters newspapers De Tijd and L’Echo

In the growing world of digital devices newspapers have to find ways to re-invent themselves. After the app for the iPad and the HTML5 webapps,  an HTML5 based digital newspaper emerged to serve the growing number of users owning Android or Blackberry tablets.

From the perspective of a more unified user experience throughout the complete product range, the old flash-based graphical paper required a redesign to fulfill the expectations set by the upcoming tablet usage. A redesign was started to mirror the look and feel that tablet users get on the iPad app or  on the HTML5 web application, resulting also in an extra set of functionality as compared to the former flash-based graphical paper.

Some of the extra advantages offered include:

• Easier navigation between the graphical and text version of an article
• Possibility to zoom into a page and read the original paper on your browser
• A navigation menu at the bottom allowing easy navigation through the original paper
• Printing articles or sharing articles through mail, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn

The digital newspaper is currently available to Digital or Complete subscribers and offers the same content as the original newspaper in paper form.  The subscriber can choose freely to read the paper articles in graphical form or text form and also has the ability like before to download pages in PDF format or even the complete paper.

Of course, designing a concept is one thing, implementing it is often another story.

The technology behind the scenes had to support a set of different browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, …) and on top of that a lot of subscribers are limited to older versions. To cope with these constraints, the digital paper has been implemented as a Javascript application built on top of Dojo, a well-known Javascript framework. Using ajax in conjuction with existing back-end services – with or without needed modifications - the local Foreach team at Mediafin was able to deliver this application with the expected behavior as intended by the designers.

Strong team co-operation, some extra reinforcement from HQ and the overall usage of best practices allowed the team to deliver on time, up to expectations and within budget.

The result of this nice achievement can be seen at http://krant.tijd.be or http://journal.lecho.be.

Press article De Tijd: Nieuwe bladerkrant op Tijd.be