YUDU Media are an established name in the digital publishing industry, recognised for their innovation and creativity. Softwire have worked with YUDU for many years; architecting, implementing and enhancing YUDU’s successful online digital publishing platform. This platform translates traditional documents such as PDFs into rich, interactive, Flash-based in-browser experiences.
Softwire were therefore a natural choice for YUDU when it came to extending their platform to the mobile consumer. YUDU commissioned Softwire to design and develop a rebrandable content reader application targeting the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch families.
Softwire provided a full service throughout the entire product lifecycle: working with YUDU to discuss and refine specifications, designing, developing and testing the software, deploying to the Apple App Store, and providing on-going support.
Softwire worked in close communication with technical and sales staff from YUDU to produce a solution that was closely aligned with the changing priorities of YUDU’s customers, whilst working to an aggressive deadline. Softwire met this deadline and enabled YUDU to be amongst the first to market on the iPad platform.
Softwire delivered:
- An application able to read and display PDF content, targeting the iPad and also the iPhone and iPod Touch families. A smooth and slick user experience was paramount in order to fully take advantage of the tactile and responsive iPad platform.
- Seamless integration with (and extension of) the YUDU Pro publishing platform. The app not only displays PDFs published on the core system, but adds interactive functionality such as inline video display, web, email and phone links, page navigation and textual search, amongst others.
- Quick and simple rebranding functionality, allowing YUDU’s clients to easily customise the look and feel of the application displaying their publications.
- A clean architecture allowing future extensibility, as well as full forwards- and backwards-compatibility. This will ensure that content can always be read, regardless of the version of the app or age of the published content.
The iPad app was written in Objective C using the Cocoa API and the iPhone SDK. The Yudu Pro extensions were written in Java, using various Java Enterprise technologies, such as JBoss, Spring MVC and Java Persistence backed by Oracle databases.
Softwire delivered to both the agreed schedule and planned budget. The finished product is impressive, slick and intuitive, a strong player in the digital publishing space on Apple devices, and an important part of YUDU Media’s successful catalogue of publishing solutions.
Customer testimonial
“Softwire were tasked with developing a quality iPad solution to be added to our current software-as-a-service platform that had to maintain the same exceptional quality, robust build and straightforward workflow for our end users. Despite the tight timescales, they delivered top quality work on time and the end result is by far one of the most robust iPad Reader solutions on the market.”
Richard Stephenson, CEO, Yudu Media
Spring Digital