Writing
Technical writing, consumer journalism and book authoring from a freelance journalist with more than 20 years of experience and strong editing and sub-editing skills. Click the picture to find out more.
Editorial Production
Unparalleled experience in print and online publishing from an editorial production and digital imaging specialist with colour management and PDF workflow expertise. Click the picture to find out more.
The latest issue of YOU INSPIRE, the six-monthly luxury fashion special supplement to the Mail On Sunday‘s YOU magazine, has been published in print and on iPad simultaneously.
The print magazine’s design and sub-editing team handled all of the iPad page creation, including practically all the interactive features. Behind-the-scenes videos of the magazine’s exotic photo-shoots were recorded and edited with the full participation of the YOU editorial team. A new version of the YOU INSPIRE app was released a week earlier, enabling more social networking options for readers to share pages with each other.
App updating, testing, finishing and publishing, as well as on-going technical supervision of the iPad project, was delivered by Alistair Dabbs for Bento Media.
Both the iPad app and all its downloadable issues are available free of charge from the iTunes App Store.
British national daily newspaper, the Daily Mail, has launched an iPad version of its tablet edition, Daily Mail Plus.
Delivered electronically every morning to readers’ iPads via Newsstand subscription, Daily Mail Plus presents the content of Britain’s most popular mid-market newspaper in a carefully packaged app designed for easy reading without having to pan and zoom. The ‘Plus’ refers to the additional content offered exclusively to readers of the app, including:
- daily 360-degree panoramas
- extended photo news galleries
- news videos
- Gary Rhodes’ daily video recipes
- extended Sport sections
- interactive TV and Radio guide and listings
- interactive crosswords, sudoku and puzzles
Daily Mail Plus is neither a sequence of PDFs from the printed paper nor a stream from the celebrity website MailOnline. The app and its daily content is created by a growing, dedicated editorial team at the Daily Mail and produced using Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS).
Technical expertise in Adobe DPS was delivered throughout the app’s development by Alistair Dabbs at Bento Media, and he is currently on a rolling contract to offer nightly production troubleshooting on the title during its launch phase.
The same team also publishes a simpler edition of Daily Mail Plus for Android tablets.
Daily Mail Plus is compatible with all iPads, including the iPad Mini. The app itself is free to download from the iTunes App Store, and issues can be purchased individually or on a weekly or monthly subscription. It is currently available on a 30-day free trial.
Editorial Production by .
For the second consecutive year, judges for the UK’s Digital Magazine Awards have selected the iPad edition of YOU INSPIRE magazine as one of just five finalists in the ‘Fashion Magazine’ category.
The magazine appears twice yearly as a ‘Luxury Fashion Special’ supplement to the weekly glossy colour magazine YOU that accompanies The Mail On Sunday newspaper, published by Associated Newspapers. The iPad edition is published in parallel by company’s digital arm, A&N Media, using the same editorial and sales teams.
Technical production using Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) was handled by Alistair Dabbs for Bento Media.
YOU INSPIRE‘s strength lies in presenting an easy-to-use, uncomplicated tablet version of the tabloid glossy print edition that can be read at actual size on the iPad screen without relying on pinch-and-zoom navigation. Every page has been designed in portrait and landscape alternatives to allow readers to choose whichever way they feel most comfortable holding their iPads.
Needless for-the-sake-of-it interactivity has been toned down in favour of gentle animation, ‘quiet’ media and a minimal use of buttons, which are employed only for showing products in close-up or for hiding captions that would otherwise obscure the beautiful photography.
The September 2012 edition of YOU INSPIRE is the magazine’s fifth outing, and the fourth on the iPad. Following a successful couple of successful years since launch, the publishing frequency looks like increasing: a pre-Christmas ‘Luxury Gift Guide’ edition appeared in print and in the iPad app on 11 November 2012.
YOU INSPIRE is available not only for the original iPad and iPad 2 but also at ultra-high resolution for the latest iPads with Retina displays, not to mention the brand-new iPad Mini.
The YOU INSPIRE iPad app can be downloaded free of charge from Apple’s iTunes App Store, and the individual magazine editions downloadable from within the app are also free.
Editorial Production by .
The Daily Mail‘s two-part glossy magazine supplement Kate – A Royal Odyssey, celebrating a year in the life of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge since her wedding to William in April 2011, has now also been published as a 64-page iPad magazine app.
Kate – A Royal Odyssey can be downloaded here for free.
Alistair Dabbs (for Bento Media) handled production of the pages using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, adapting the original print designs for the iPad screen, ensuring text legibility without need for zooming or panning. The app goes further than the print edition by adding more than 300 extra photos across 22 photo galleries, every picture captioned and credited, along with front-and-back views of Kate’s dresses as worn at public events. Touch interactivity is built into the pages all across the magazine.
Once installed on your iPad, the Kate app allows you to download a free preview of the magazine – yours to keep – and optionally buy the full supplement as a £0.69 in-app purchase. Both the free preview and the full supplement are available in optimised resolutions for the new hi-res iPad 3 and the original iPad/iPad2: the user only sees the version appropriate for their tablet, so there’s no confusion. The iPad 3 edition provides hi-res photography and razor-sharp text throughout.
Alistair Dabbs carried out the bulk of the InDesign production work over the course of a weekend, with author’s changes and in-house approval being completed three days later, ready for submission to Apple before the end of the week.
He has produced two other iPad apps for Associated Newspapers, both still available in the iOS App Store: YOU Inspire and Mail On Sunday Royal Wedding.
Editorial Production by .
Apr 12
30
Weekly column at The Register
Alistair is now writing a weekly opinion column for IT news website The Register and its product reviews sister site Register Hardware.
Under the strap Something for the weekend, sir? (no connection to the now-defunct Radio 2 programme), the column voices the frustrations experienced by those of us who share a love-hate relationship with their computers at work and home. Mostly hate, actually. Readers are invited to comment freely, and indeed they do.
Catch up on the columns you have missed by visiting Alistair’s author page at Register Hardware.
IN OTHER NEWS: It has been busy at Bento Media over the winter, which explains the lack of posts here in the main area. Regular updates via Twitter appear in the right-hand column of this page, of course.
Writing by .