The nominations have been announced for the 2013 Online Media Awards and I’m pleased to see my products nominated in two categories.

First, heraldscotland.com has been nominated in the category Best Local/Regional News Site.  Stiff competition in this category including BBC News, Sky and Newsquest stablemate the Daily Echo.

Second, our Sunday Herald Life app has been nominated for Best App.  Competition here is tight too – Grazia, the Metro, Sky and the Economist all have really strong entries.

Will be interesting to see what happens… but great just to be nominated and up against such big national brands.

The full list of nominees can be found here: http://www.onlinemediaawards.net/nominations

This weekend sees the launch of the Sunday Herald Life app, the first public app I’ve released based on the Adobe DPS platform.  Issue number one is available now, free of charge from iTunes: http://bit.ly/sh-life

I’ve been using Adobe DPS on and off for a couple of years now and have been really impressed with how the platform has developed.  In issue one we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible – a little bit of video, some hyperlinks and an animation – but our plan is to make full use of the interactive elements in the coming months.

The whole Sunday Herald team has put a ton of work into the content of the app (I reckon there are at least 200 pages in the launch issue) and I’m really excited about the future direction for the app, especially as our top photographers get into dSLR video which could provide great additional content for future issues.

I’m also looking forward to using DPS for a ton of other projects. As a newspaper group we have dozens of talented InDesign users and buckets of good content waiting to be used.  Hopefully we’ll be able to pair some of those up in exciting new ways for fun and profit.

Media coverage

• All Media Scotland
• The Drum

Last summer I was given the opportunity to develop my first iPhone app.  It was for the Wee Red Book, the Evening Times football almanac that has been published since the 1920s.

Today we’re making the app completely free for the rest of the 2012-13 season.  Hit the relevant store link below to get your free copy…

• In the Apple App Store – for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
• In the Google Play Store – for Android smartphones and tablets

If you like the app, please give it a nice rating or review in the app store.  If you don’t like it, please let me know so we can make a better version for the 2013-14 season.

Please bear in mind that the app was developed in an insanely short timescale – just me, for four weeks, developing for both iOS and Android… including the time it took to extract and database the entire contents of the print edition.

In case you’re undecided, the app includes:

• Fact files for every club in the SPL and Divisions 1-3.
• Final league tables for the past season across all main Scottish leagues.
• Scottish Cup, League Cup and Challenge Cup results dating back to 1873.
• Scotland’s international record, country by country, back to the 1870s.
• Every Scottish player capped (and every international match played) since the 1870s.
• Player of the month for the past season. Player of the year dating back to the 1950s.
• Plus dozens more tables, lists and stats.

Live data:

• Fixtures for the whole season across the SPL, Division 1-3 and Scottish Cups.
• Latest match results for the SPL, Divisions 1-3 and Scottish Cup games.
• Live league tables for SPL and Divisions 1-3.

This week, amidst one of the worst snow storms to hit the Northeast US, the Digital Street Paper project I’ve been working on with the INSP was the subject of one of the talks at the Brand Perfect Tour in New York.

The INSP’s Maree Aldam talked about the challenges that street papers face in the digital age and how our project was one attempt to react to changing reader consumption patterns.  You can see a quick video summary of Maree’s talk here on YouTube.

The full background to Maree’s New York visit and talk can be found here on the Brand Perfect site.

About a year ago my manager at the Herald & Times set me a challenge – how do you move street papers like the Big Issue into the digital age?

On one level it sounds like a trivial problem.  Dozens of solutions already exist to translate newspapers and magazines into digital editions.  We already use several such systems for our commercial newspapers and magazines – everything from digital facsimile systems like NewspaperDirect to bespoke print-to-digital workflows like the one we developed between Atex Prestige and our Drupal-based CMS for heraldscotland.com.

Any of those solutions would be a valid way to get street papers into a digital format.  But street papers present another, unique challenge… how do you preserve the physical transaction with the vendor on the street when everything is digital?

There are, of course, high-tech solutions to that conundrum – technologies like NFC, RFID and swiping cards with Square readers are all valid solutions.  But they’re also fragile, expensive and not particularly well suited to the street vendor environment. In the end I came up with a pretty simple solution.  Using cardboard cards printed with unique access codes, vendors could sell ‘digital’ editions of their magazines alongside the regular print editions.

Working with David Craik, the wonderful team from the International Network of Street Papers and some talented designers and developers from 999 Design we’re well on the way towards launching a pilot scheme.  The pilot will run with the UK’s Big Issue in the North and Streetwise in Chicago.

Today we’ve launched a crowd funding campaign on Kickstarter to raise the money we need for a successful pilot launch. Please check out our video below and if you’d like to back the project (and get some fab rewards) please go here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1882811473/the-digital-street-paper

Press coverage:

• Mashable - Network of Homeless Newspapers Tries QR-Code Digital Edition
• The Register - Big Issue sellers could soon be flogging QR Codes
• Journalism.co.uk - Digital edition street papers pilot due to launch in July
• The Drum - The Big Issue in the North to trial selling digital issues on the street
• Big Issue South Africa - Street papers make bold move towards digital
• 2D Code - Street Papers Go Digital With QR Codes
• CorpComms - Manchester Big Issue sellers go digital
• INSP blog - Street papers announce digital initiative (and need your help to make it happen!)

For the past couple of years I’ve had the dubious honour of being asked to produce the Christmas e-card for the Herald & Times Group.  It’s always a tricky brief – produce a seasonal e-card without dragging myself or others away from a busy schedule.

In previous years I’ve just pulled together a picture, some clip art and a Christmas-y tune in Flash to make something like this: http://www.heraldandtimeslabs.com/christmas2010/

…which is OK, but not very exciting.  So this year, I decided to try something different.

Over the space of a week I took around 3,500 still photos around our Glasgow office and Cambuslang print plant.   I then stitched these photos together using a free Mac app called Time Lapse Assembler to produce a pretty smooth 30 frames/sec timelapse video.  In turn, this was edited to match an appropriate Christmas tune in iMovie.  Here’s the result…

Two cameras were used on the shoot.  Most of the pics came from my Nikon D3100 using both an 18-55mm zoom and an 8mm fish eye for the really wide angle shots.  Interval timing was handled by a great little remote shutter release I got off eBay for about £15.  It does everything the official Nikon one does for about a tenth of the price.

My backup camera was a Ricoh CX1 which I used to capture a second angle while the D3100 was in use (like when the drivers were loading their trucks and while everyone gathered for the final “Merry Christmas” shot).

In total I reckon I spent approx four hours shooting the pics (elapsed time was more like 18 hours, but most of the time I could leave the camera and get on with other work) and then about another three hours assembling the footage and editing in iMovie.  So, for less than a day’s work — or about the same as I’d have spent creating another cheesy Santa animation — I reckon we got a much better result.

Producing this video has really given me the timelapse bug, so for Christmas I’m getting a custom-built robotic tripod head which will allow me to combine real tilts and pans with my timelapse photography.  Exciting stuff!