Penguin Teachers' Academy available in Newsstand now

[MrKistic]

Hi all,

I thought it was about time I mentioned the Baker based app I've been working on. It's actually been in the app store for a little while already but we've just had our iOS 7 update approved and we're doing a full launch tomorrow.

https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/penguin-teachers-academy/id674978287?mt=8

Penguin provides teaching resources in Australia related to our publications for use in schools. Our Newsstand app offers our free quarterly magazine as well as special editions with teaching notes which may be free or for purchase depending on the level of content included.

It's iPad only and I've managed to keep it working on iOS 5.1 too. I included the PSTCollectionView to take care of that, many of our users will still be on older iPads running 5.1 so we really needed to keep that... I cursed every time I saw an update removing iOS 5 related code recently! ;)

I've made some minor UI changes to the layout of the shelf to give the issues some extra framing. I also added a spinner and status update when clicking the reload button. All these mods are in branches in my Baker fork on GitHub.

We're using InDesign and in5 to create each issue, meaning that our print designer does most of the work with just some minor tweaks by a developer where required who then packages it up.

I started out looking at MagRocket for our backend but I found that I couldn't easily modify it for our internal user requirements. I've since built a new backend, including the ability to send APNS messages (push notifications) to automatically download new issues, which worked a treat today. I'm also hoping to be able to make that source available on GitHub soon.

But most importantly, a massive thank you to everyone involved in the Baker project!! We had been looking at some of the paid options with little interest, but Baker allowed us to create our Newsstand app with internal development time only. Such a great resource, we certainly wouldn't have been able to do it on our own in such a short time.

Thanks again,
Mark

[MaverickWar]

Wow. Amazing work Mark! It looks great and well done on being able to implement code to make older device software work, that can be a pig of a job sometimes!

Would be keen to see this backend you've implemented, did you use a push provider and integrate or something like parse? Or is it custom?

[MaverickWar]

Also do you have any idea when you may be posting it to github?

[folletto]

Thanks to you! You make us incredibly happy and proud to see such a passionate team and a wonderful result like that... for such an important theme as education! :)

[MrKistic]

Thanks guys, we're pretty happy with it. @folletto I still think I owe you more thanks than you me!

@MaverickWar I've implemented the push notifications by integrating EasyAPNS into my project. It took a little bit to get it working the way I needed but it was a pretty good solution. I've altered our Baker app to send the extra information required to our server for the APNS messages. So all internal, no third party service required. I'll need to do a bit of tidying up for public release and I also need to make sure it's all clear with Penguin, but that doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment. So no immediate release, but certainly not too far away.