You’ve guessed it – there’s an app for that
07 February 2011
RS Components recently demonstrated to me their latest route to market for its eTech - its technology based customer magazine.
What RS has done is introduce an app for the Apple iPad that allows readers to view the eTech magazine in five different ways. The four others being: print, online ‘page-turner’, through the DesignSpark website, and the articles are also available through the main RS website.
RS Components, just in case you don’t recognise the name, is one of the biggest catalogue distributors but in some parts of the world it operates through its subsidiaries, most notably Allied Electronics in North America.
I really am interested to see how this develops. I think that by offering an app through the Apple store, RS has earned itself the publicity it will get as being the first company of its type to have an app of this type. I also saw the magazine in action and it is a step further up the digital evolutionary ladder from the web-based page-turning style magazines that are now familiar. Perhaps most significant is that the reader is viewing a file on their iPad rather than something online. After installing the app, new issues will be downloaded as soon as they become available. Viewing the magazine can therefore be without the delays that often occur with magazines hosted online. This is particularly apparent when viewing the embedded videos.
Other embedded content that particularly impressed me was the pictures that can be rotated by 360 degrees and the ‘scrollable’ embedded windows. Having just been given a demonstration of the RS app on the iPad, I saw last week that Rupert Murdoch has launched his ‘The Daily’ newspaper for the same platform and offering similar features – this can only add momentum to this format.
Coupled with the inherent pleasure of using an iPad (well I think so anyway), this is a nicely done ‘app application’ – as it were. However…
Having only been around for under year it is difficult to say how the iPad market, and the broader tablet market, will settle down. After six months, 7 million iPads had been sold and unverified figures I have seen indicated that this has since doubled. No doubt this exponential growth will continue for a while yet and the rest of the tablet market, while still playing catch-up and waiting for the Android-based platform to ‘stabilise’, will also blossom. But despite all these millions of machines out there, how many are going to be used in the business environment? And how many of those will be engineers? My instinct will be that it is very few.
I recently saw someone give a one-to-one presentation on an iPad and thought that was quite a tidy application – slick, modern and effective. It was a presentation that could not be downloaded to or from the iPad to give to a customer of course because the iPad currently lacks the connectivity expected of a business computer – but I concede it was a neat use of the iPad.
So apart from viewing magazines and for coffee table presenting, are there enough uses for the iPad to make it part of the electronics designers essential toolkit? My only hesitation in saying an outright ‘NO’ to this question is that there are some fundamentals of human nature involved in the evolution of technology. It’s a sort of Darwinism – that which is desired will survive! Maybe the most obvious example is the automotive sector – nobody ‘needs’ to drive a Mercedes-Benz, but if they can afford to they will. So having established that there is a market for luxury cars, a ‘virtuous cycle’ develops where both manufacturer and customer are looking for the most luxurious, most technically capable and most attractively designed.
It is the same with the tablet market. Whether there was really a ‘need’ for a computer at this level is immaterial if there is a desire for it. If engineers, and people who supply those engineers, can fabricate reasons for the tablet computer to enter the business environment then I imagine that they will do so.
As you can tell, I remain to be convinced, but I do know that I would like an iPad… I just need to justify to myself the reasons for getting one!
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