12 May 2016
For a more profound and structured presence of the Lebanese Newspaper “Assafir” on the mobile landscape, IDS designed and developed a mobile application for Assafir leveraging its scope of work to a higher level, hence providing the newspaper with more exposure and establishing it as one of the most cutting edge sources of news in the region. The application was developed to allow the publication’s readers to browse the newspaper’s content from multiple devices through an intuitive and interactive interface. The application was developed in a way to be fully integrated with Assafir’s website, and to generate the news feeds on a daily basis. However, for enhanced control of the content that will be displayed to the users, Assafir created a web-based back-end management system, which will enable the employees to modify and control other aspects of the application such as advertisement, multimedia, push notifications and other settings. The back end automatically synchronizes with the applications.
Some of the application’s features can be summarized as shown below:
- Archive. To save up older stories and topics surfed by the user.
- Simple & Efficient Navigation A quick view on the pictures and articles.
- Customization Options. Users are able to select their favorite sections with a one-touch access.
- Push Notifications. The application provides the ability to interact with online users by sending Push Notifications using modal objects. (Push notifications may be disabled from the applications setup)
- Outstanding Performance and Page Loading. Assafir application has an outstanding performance when it comes to page loading and live news feeds updates.
- Pull to Refresh where news will be reloaded to the latest ones.
- Advanced Search. Users can always search for any required article or author and are able to load more news.
- Social Media Share Option. Provides the users with the ability to share the articles via email and social networks (email, Facebook, twitter, Google+, etc.…)
- Favorites. The user is able to mark any article as a favorite article for later retrieval
- Section Navigation. The users are able to navigate between sections and articles.
- HTML article view with hyperlinks
- When reading, the user is able to open links in the article directly from the app.
The mobile app is available for Android mobile, and for IOS on iPhone.
A newer version of the application will be created for the iPad and the Android Tablets that will include more features such as:
- Advertising Banner. That can be managed from the back-office.
- Ability for the users to Upload their own News
- Photo Gallery Views that list all images for all news sectioned by category. User can pinch image.
- Comment View the user can send his comment in addition to his contact info.
- In-App Purchase. Users are allowed to purchase older versions of the newspaper and to read the full pdf version of the newspaper through In-App purchases.
STAY TUNED!
