The MAZ Blog

One month ago, MAZ released a browser called “Stream Web” for iOS. Unlike other iOS browsers, which are scaled down versions of desktop browsers, Stream Web is made specifically with mobile devices in mind. When we started to create the browser, we looked at the ones already out there and asked ourselves: why are their address bars and navigation placed at the top of the screen, where you have to reach for them? Why are there back and forward buttons on phones that are made as touch devices, with full gesture capabilities? And most importantly, why are we still copying and pasting ugly, long URLs to share what we like? The entire MAZ team was along for the journey every step of the way, discussing at length what we all utilized the most in the mobile browsers we were using, and what else we wished we had.

It’s always a proud moment for all of us at MAZ to release something we really believe in. But, one thing we wish it had been possible to fix for everyone is the ability to change your default browser on iOS. Today, I will share a tip for iOS developers (not a developer? skip the code and read what's next) on how to provide a user with an option to open links from their app to Stream Web.

Use below methods to implement “Open in Stream Web” functionality:

(BOOL) isStreamWebInstalled

    return [[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL: [NSURL URLWithString:@"strmw://"]];

  //Use this method to open the URL as a new tab in Stream Web.

    (BOOL) openInStreamWeb:(NSURL *) url

        NSURL *swURL = [self webToStreamWeb:url];

            return [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:swURL];

// Utility method to convert web url to Stream Web custom url.

­   (NSURL *) webToStreamWeb:(NSURL *) url

        NSURL *swURL = nil;

        if([url.scheme isEqualToString:@"http"])

            swURL = [NSURL URLWithString:[url.absoluteString

    stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:[url scheme] withString:@"strmw"]];

        else if([url.scheme isEqualToString:@"https"])

            swURL = [NSURL URLWithString:[url.absoluteString

stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:[url scheme] withString:@"strmws"]];

Okay, so if that didn’t make sense to you - here is a general tip for everyone to open web pages that you’re reading in Safari to Stream Web. Basically, you need to write a “Bookmarklet”, which is a normal bookmark with some Javascript code (don’t worry). See below for the steps!

1. Open Safari and open any web page 

2. Tap on Share icon at the bottom and choose bookmark

3. Change Bookmark title to “Open In Stream Web” Tap on "Save" to save bookmark

4. Tap on bookmark icon next to share icon

5. Tap on "Edit" at the Bottom right Tap on the “Open In Stream Web”, the bookmark you just made

6. Change the URL (e.g. http://streamapp.co/) to:

javascript:location.href='strmw’+location.href.substring(4);

Now you have the option to open Safari pages in Stream Web by tapping on the Bookmark icon and choosing “Open In Stream Web.” For now, that’s all - but there will be more cool tech stuff again soon! Until then, happy Stream browsing.

*If you’re an App developer, you can now have the Stream SDK in your App. Ping us for more info!

How does Apple choose what apps to feature in their store? While it certainly comes from high downloads, positive ratings and good press, these numbers don’t just show up overnight. They can only happen if people know about your app and like it enough to spread the word. How do you create an app like that? Give users a reason to keep coming back.

Newness Factor:

Each time a user launches your app, it should have something new to offer that wasn’t there before. Think of your app like a social networking site that you refresh to find something new.  Magazines, for example, generally publish their content monthly, or weekly at best. Imagine if magazines pushed out new content more frequently; users would be launching the app multiple times a day to read what’s new. Free trials, previews, and incorporating all your social networking sites into your app can be useful tools to showcase such content, and engage users new and old alike, as seen below in our storefront.

Point of Difference:

Another important reason for a user to return to your app is what I call its “point of difference.” What makes your app stand out from all other apps? Besides basic functionality, figure out what that extra oomph to the user experience could be. Whether it’s amazing graphics, especially fast and fluid performance, or a novel feature unique to your app, this distinguisher is key. A feature unique to our apps is Stream, demonstrated below, it is a visual archive from both the publication and reader of shared and saved content in app and from the web.

While in a perfect world, I would be able to simply say, “Follow these steps and your app will be one of the best on the App Store” -- I know it is easier said than done. But to me, these are truly the most important considerations an app developer can do to draw more downloads and keep users coming back for more.

For those who don’t know how to read and write code, the “backend” of an app often goes unnoticed when using your phone or computer. But everything that you, as an end user, consider to work well comes from what you don’t see: the code.

For those who do know about code, the below script will make a lot of sense! Let's begin with two terms I'd like to discuss, relating to how an iPhone app user views images that are sourced from the web.

SDWebImage: A handy iOS library, which scours the internet to download, cache and display web-sourced images.

Amazon S3 Server: An encrypted cloud storage service provided by Amazon for storing images.

You may use or have heard about MAZ’s new mobile browser Stream Web (available free for iOS here), for which I am a developer. The whole concept behind Stream Web requires images to be stored and recalled instantaneously. I was introduced to SDWebImage when we began work on Stream, the flagship feature behind Stream Web and our app publishing platform.

I noticed that using S3 with SDWebImage could be pretty powerful for developers, but also realized that some developers might not be able to figure out how to use them together since SDWebImage does not support S3 validation (at least not yet!). Delving into the SDWebImage source to code around this issue would not be too helpful, because if a new version of SDWebImage were to be released, the developer would have to redo everything. Instead, a better approach (provided here) would be to keep SDWebImage untouched, and to intercept all its download requests and handle the S3 server downloads via the Amazon S3 SDK.

If you’d like to see what I mean, try the following:

1) Set up SDWebImage and Amazon's S3 SDKs (with credentials)

// File: AmazonClientManager.m

+ (void)validateCredentials

{

    // ...

    s3 = [[AmazonS3Client alloc] initWithAccessKey:<YOUR ACCESS KEY> withSecretKey:<YOUR SECRET KEY>];

    // ...

}

2) Subclass NSURL Protocol

// File: S3URLProtocol.h

@interface S3URLProtocol : NSURLProtocol

@end

// File: S3URLProtocol.m

#import "S3URLProtocol.h"

#import "AmazonClientManager.h"

#define kS3BucketName <YOUR BUCKET NAME>

@interface S3URLProtocol() <AmazonServiceRequestDelegate>

@property (strong, nonatomic) S3GetObjectRequest *getRequest;

@end

@implementation S3URLProtocol

// All registered protocols are asked if they can handle the request

+ (BOOL)canInitWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request

{

    // If the host is not Amazon S3 Server return 'NO' to indicate default handling

    if(![request.URL.host isEqualToString:[kS3BucketName stringByAppendingString:@".s3.amazonaws.com"]])

        return NO;

         // Yes we can handle it! Go 'startLoading'!

    return YES;

}

// Required method

+ (NSURLRequest *)canonicalRequestForRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request

{

    return request;

}

- (void)startLoading

{

    // Extract the key from the request

    NSString *key = self.request.URL.path;

    key = [key substringFromIndex:1];

         // Create a 'S3GetObjectRequest' with your bucket and the extracted key

    self.getRequest = [[S3GetObjectRequest alloc] initWithKey:key withBucket:kS3BucketName];

         // Set delegate to ourselves to handle various callbacks.

    self.getRequest.delegate = self;

         // And fire the download. The 'AmazonClientManager' will handle the 'Authentication' for us.

    [[AmazonClientManager s3] getObject:self.getRequest];

}

- (void)stopLoading

{

    // If someone cancels this, cancel the 'S3GetObjectRequest' in turn.

    [self.getRequest cancel];

    self.getRequest = nil;

}

// The 'AmazonServiceRequestDelegate' callbacks

- (void)request:(AmazonServiceRequest *)request didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse *)response

{

    // We received a response, pass it on to the client (SDWebImage).

    [self.client URLProtocol:self didReceiveResponse:response cacheStoragePolicy:NSURLCacheStorageAllowed];

}

- (void)request:(AmazonServiceRequest*)request didReceiveData:(NSData*)data

{

    // We received some data, pass it on to the client (SDWebImage).

    [self.client URLProtocol:self didLoadData:data];

}

- (void)request:(AmazonServiceRequest *)request didCompleteWithResponse:(AmazonServiceResponse *)response

{

    // Download complete! Notify client (SDWebImage) and cleanup.

    [self.client URLProtocolDidFinishLoading:self];

    self.getRequest = nil;

}

- (void)request:(AmazonServiceRequest *)request didFailWithError:(NSError *)error

{

    // Some error encountered! Notify client (SDWebImage) and cleanup.

    [self.client URLProtocol:self didFailWithError:error];

    self.getRequest = nil;

}

@end

3) Finally, hook up our shiny new "S3URLProtocol" by adding (just once!) this line to your initialization code:

[NSURLProtocol registerClass:[S3URLProtocol class]];

Now simply use the SDWebImage's categories e.g. [imageView setImageWithURL:

<IMAGE FILE URL> ...]; the host of <IMAGE FILE URL> should be equal to "<YOUR BUCKET NAME>.s3.amazonaws.com ".

Now you can use the power of the Amazon S3 cloud servers with SDWebImage in your own apps! How neat is that?

Here at MAZ, we have helped some amazing media brands across the globe to launch hundreds of apps using our publishing platform. And today, for the very first time, we are putting ourselves in their shoes -- by launching an app of our own.

We are proud to announce the release of Stream Web, a social, gesture-based web browser for iOS.

How is it that a publishing platform company came to make a web browser? Well, for starters, we see ourselves as much more than a publishing platform. MAZ’s mission has always been to connect people with content. What we learned pretty fast is that on digital devices, people don’t only want to receive content; they also want to participate in it.

That’s why we created Stream, a social layer that lives on top of every MAZ-powered app, allowing the user to “cut out” anything they see on their screen and share or save it instantly. Stream also provides a running visual archive of everything they’ve ever shared or saved.

It works like this:

Compare that to how we traditionally share on the web: boring text URLs, copied and pasted. In fact, that’s the same way we’ve been sharing content for the entire 25-year history of the web. Copy and paste into an email, copy and paste onto Twitter, and so on.

With Stream Web, we are bringing the power and beauty of Stream to -- you guessed it -- the entire web. Instead of sharing URLs, you can now share clips of actual content. And each clip, whether it be an image, text, or both, serves as a link back to the original source. So you are still sharing a link, but it’s a visual one instead of the same old ugly text. Then you can visit your Stream at any time to see a real-time feed of everything you’ve ever shared or saved.

Switching your web browser to Stream Web on your iPhone and iPad will make you feel like you are using the real mobile web for the first time, not just a scaled down version of a desktop browser.

Check out some of the neat features we’ve cooked up below, and of course, go download Stream Web for free right now to see it for yourself!

Spotlight Media publishes Bison Illustrated, the official magazine for the Bison Athletics teams at North Dakota State University.  They’ve taken a valuable lesson from the varsity football team, who recently won their third straight FCS title in January: don’t walk when you can run! As Mike Dragosavich, Founder of Spotlight Media Publishing puts it, “We produced a full functioning app on the app stores within no time. It’s an efficient process, period.”

Incorporating the MAZ publishing platform into their media strategy, Bison Illustrated has entered the app market with an engaging and truly cross-platform product line. And they’ve done it all without adding any additional staff or resources. 

Take a page from their playbook, and learn how to make your app just as competitive as theirs:

1.  In-App Navigation and Custom Help Pages

Spotlight Media craftily included custom help pages into their issues. They quickly familiarize the reader with the navigation and media icons they should look out for, the designated areas to visit, and a “visual” table of contents leading to coach and athlete interviews, team schedules, and game summaries.

2.  Featured Video Content

Based on an engagement study that MAZ conducted recently, pages that have a video button are four times more likely to be tapped. Bison Illustrated has video all over it.  And once tapped, the metric for time spent in-page sky rockets.  

3.  Custom Landing Page for Promotion

In addition to promoting the Bison Illustrated app through their own properties (website, print, and social), they actually made an exclusive landing page just for the app. And it’s awesome.

4.  Advertising: Interactive and Social Ads

Spotlight extends the digital canvas to their advertisers as well.  Check out this in-app advertisement for Pratek Philippe watches, which includes a play button for a video ad, a web button to take the reader to Pratek’s online destination (without ever leaving the app), and MAZ’s patent-pending Stream technology, which allows the user to “cut out” and share anything they see to their favorite social media site, their friend’s inbox, or even via a text message.

5.  E-Commerce

On a tablet or smartphone, anything can be made purchasable. For example, Spotlight has integrated One Herd, their clothing line for Bison sports fans.  Users can browse the inventory, tap to learn more, share, and purchase — all in the app!

Don't just take my word for it, though -- download the free Bison Illustrated app on iTunes or Google Play, and see for yourself. And check out MAZ Publishing if you're curious how we can help you create and optimize your app, too!

MAZ has spent the last three years helping other companies create apps.

For the first time, we have created an app to call our very own– a mobile web browser called Stream Web.

Within the hundreds of apps created with MAZ, we saw that many people use Stream to share and save content from the web. Which got us thinking... what if you could use Stream to share and save from any website?

Congratulations are in order: MAZ partner FOUR just won Gourmand World Cookbooks Awards' Best UK Food Magazine for 2013! We are proud to power the app for such a superlative publication and team. Read FOUR's news post here, and check out their app here. Treat yourself!

Happy New Year!

To start the year off right, we cooked up an infographic with some recent findings based on over a million user sessions across various MAZ apps.

Turns out that entertainment content is leading the pack when it comes to engagement with the average reader spending 38 minutes in each issue!

Check out the full press release for more useful stats.

More exciting announcements coming soon!

I’ve been working at MAZ’s Noida, India office for almost a year. I’m a web engineer, focused on Ruby on Rails, and I’d like to share what it is like to work at MAZ. Prior to joining the office, I had worked at a much bigger company, and switching to MAZ was important to me; while the startup culture demands a lot of effort, it comes with many rewards.

From the first impression, I was excited to join the company. Unlike at big companies, I was immediately able to interact with the founders, be involved with plans for the future, and work together with everyone in the office towards shared goals. The MAZ culture is very straightforward, and there are no bad surprises amongst the team.

I felt welcome from the very first day. We have lunch together, we share jokes, and discuss not only work but also politics, sports and family. What some people don’t know about product development is how crucial every detail is. The type of team I work with needs to have trust in order to get the job done, and I am lucky to work with a team full of ex-Apple, ex-Adobe, and self-starters. We all learn from each other.

The way India works is that we can come and go from the office at any time, as long as we have our responsibilities in order. We have meetings every other day, and every two weeks with the New York office. Though it can be hard with the 10.5 hour time difference, we are constantly communicating and sharing feedback with the entire team.

To me, it is unique that our offices are full of people who are so passionate, not only about our line of work, but with many things -- we have a singer, a spear fisherman, a motorcyclist, and more.  We are able to spend time together outside of the office, celebrate our achievements, play games, eat potluck meals, and always work hard.

MAZ is a place of constant change, and I am excited and happy to be a part of it.

Before there was Siri, before the iPad, before FaceTime, even before WiFi -- there was Knowledge Navigator.

  26 years ago, John Sculley - then CEO of Apple - thus envisioned the future of computer design and user interface. I don’t recall seeing this in 1987, but I’m sure I would have thought it was science fiction, just like Star Wars or E.T. Today, that very fiction is the norm. The advent of smart mobile devices have brought us exactly what was prophesied by Knowledge Navigator. Like the professor in the video above, I use a virtual butler, Siri, to get weather updates.  I use FaceTime to have a visual conference with friends. To get digital content and news, I turn to my iPad. And like the professor, as it happens, Apple is the brand with which I interface.

However far-fetched it seemed at the time, Knowledge Navigator helped its audience to reimagine what technology could be. I’m without doubt that tech will evolve at an even more incredible pace in the next quarter century. How it will impact the way we communicate with each other, and how we consume content, remains open to debate.

There has been a lot of talk recently about whether magazines are failing on tablets, and if publishers should rethink their tablet/mobile strategies. Here at MAZ, we have had the privilege of working with hundreds of publishers to help them create and better understand their tablet strategies, and therefore the time to think about how we can improve both the user experience and sales figures for these apps.

Let's get one thing straight: consumers are absolutely interested in reading magazines on their tablets. Newsstands apps, which are typically free in the App Store, in fact see very promising download numbers. But once they’ve downloaded the app, readers are typically asked to make a decision: either buy a single issue, or subscribe to the app outright. And that's where the problem starts. There is a significant delta between the total number of app downloads and those that convert into a subscription or a one-time in-app purchase.

Let's say I like cooking and search for some cooking terms in the App Store, then download a food publication that looks interesting. But once I open it, I'm not yet sure if I want to purchase/pay for anything. If the publication is forcing me to make that decision right off the bat, I will most likely just delete the app. It’s a lot of commitment upfront; in the heyday of print mags, I doubt anybody ever purchased a magazine for the first time without at least skimming through an issue at a friend’s home or the corner store.

So how does a publisher solve this problem? We looked at this question long and hard at MAZ, and decided to change our approach to Newsstand app.  We updated all of our 600+ apps, converting each to be a “hub” for their publication rather than simply a digital reader (which is, unfortunately, still the industry standard). So now when you download a MAZ powered app, such as the free Inc. Magazine app, you are now taken to their digital hub - including live feeds from their website, Twitter, and Pinterest board, along with the opportunity to purchase an issue or subscription. The idea is to let consumers experience content from the publisher by aggregating various feeds, such as the publisher's website, blog and social media platforms. This gives the user several reasons to keep the app, as they can:

1. Get all of the publisher's free web and social content in one place.

2. Become familiar with the type of content to expect from the publisher should they make a purchase.

3) Enjoy whatever other free content the publishers might want to offer as an incentive to pay for the priced content. (On this last point, Inc. offers a free back issue, though the possibilities are limitless here.)

As long as the app stays installed on the device, the publisher can now market to that user using push notifications, featured web content, featured video content, and so on. Using these tools, you can build brand loyalty over time.

We believe this new approach to Newsstand magazine apps will lead to higher engagement with the apps, less deletion, and ultimately more purchases. Our publishers are already seeing a significant spike in the usage of their apps as a direct result of shifting to the “hub” approach. Users now see these apps as a multi-faceted brand and content center instead of just a place to either buy something or get out.

Last week, I introduced some of the many challenges that continue to face publishers in the digital age and app ecosystem. As I concluded, the root of the problem is as follows:

In my opinion, the biggest problem in today’s magazine app economy is the lack of a sound engagement strategy. Publishers need a way to ensure that readers spend a lot of time with the content, and have reasons to return to the app everyday - even several times a day - like they do with their social networking apps. In the golden age of print media, engagement was a much simpler game. A physical magazine would lie on the coffee table, next to some other magazines, and the reader would engage himself with one of these few competing titles for hours on end. The notion of having to check if some new pages had magically appeared in one or several of these magazines would have, of course, seemed farcical. But reading patterns and attention spans are dramatically different today: with smartphones and tablets, the digital magazine resides next to hundred of other apps on the device, competing for user’s time not only with other mag apps, but everything from social networking to games to text and email.

So, what to do?

Unbundle! Publish content in smaller quantities, but much more frequently. It’s conventional to publish at regular intervals for print because of the medium’s own challenges - printing costs, production and distribution timeframes. etc. But for digital, the app lives right on the tablet of the reader. It is always accessible, and super dynamic: new content can be delivered instantaneously, with no extra production costs. Imagine if there were no print history to the publishing industry, and magazines were being designed deliberately for digital. The idea of publishing just one issue per month probably wouldn’t even occur to you.

Promote to current users! Once your content is published to your app, let everyone know about it. MAZ offers “On the Fly Push Notifications” with which you can send push notifications to all your readers who have the app installed on their device. These swiftly alert them to what’s new and interesting in the app, an easy and effective way to drive engagement.

Promote to future users! Be active on social media, and keep talking about your latest issues via your social channels, be it about an article from the issue, about a reader’s response to a particular story, or whatever it may be. But make sure that whatever you add is interesting and shareable!

Consolidate and emphasize your brand! The app needs to engage the reader with the magazine brand in total, not just the app. As your readers love your brand, the app should feel like a consortium for all the mediums your brand uses, be it your website, your Twitter feed, your YouTube channel, or your Pinterest board. MAZ’s Store is a leap forward in this direction: readers can experience the magazine’s entire brand, not just the app, whenever they open it. It’s a centralized way for the reader to stay abreast of all that’s happening in and around your brand.

Better yet, with our “Featured Web Content,” you can specifically promote a particular social channel right on your app’s Store. Feature Web Content comes up as a draggable window that opens automatically when the Store is launched. Let’s say, on a given day, your Twitter feed is your most popular social medium; with this feature you can hit a switch and change your Featured Web Content to your Twitter feed, so more people can partake in all the activity. On another day, you can point it to your website instead, where a new blog post has been garnering tons of pageviews.

Be dynamic! Keep updating your links, videos, and galleries on the fly, and keep your coverage current, so your readers can enjoy a sense of freshness every time they visit the app (even within the same issue). Apps, unlike print, don't have to be static. You would never return to a website that seldom updated, would you?

Get your readers to promote for you! Today’s readers enjoy contributing to your social ecosystem, and using content of yours to contribute to their own. Our critically acclaimed “Clippings” feature (which Mashable immediately praised upon release, and our client Forbes more recently called "really cool shit!"), so that users can easily “cut out” what they like with a simple two-finger gesture, and broadcast it to the world.

As Paul says in his interview with BillionSuccess “I want to take Clippings even further by understanding why and how people share while reading online.” More and more, social is part of our world, and whether we like it or not, we must embrace it, in apps and everywhere.

Doing even just some of the above can make a magazine truly digital, and reverse the declining trend currently seen in the publishing business. Publisher needs to have an engagement strategy that fully exploits the unique advantages of being digital. MAZ's platform makes all of the above as simple as can be -- and a fresh stock of major updates on the way, we're about to make it even simpler.

Everybody knows we’re living in a time of great change and challenge for the magazine business. 

On the one hand, the industry is seeing a lot of innovation in the digital age: countless new ideas, publishing solutions, formats and philosophies. Most large and mid-sized publishing houses now employ dedicated digital teams, producing and distributing content specifically for and to devices that were unprecedented just a few years ago.

On the other hand, print circulations are declining heavily, and despite the best efforts of both content creators and their marketing teams, the number of ad pages are dropping with them.

So it’s imperative that something changes -- and it certainly isn't the people who produce the magazine content, or those who sell the ads. They know their jobs well; they have been doing them for years. They may need a new toolset, but remain the best men and women for the task at hand nonetheless.

And the promise is still there -- moreso than ever, in fact. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt points out, there is no doubt that “the potential audience for publishers will explode.” Tablet sales are booming, and will outsell PCs worldwide by the end of this year, according to IDC. By 2017, tablet users are projected to number 160.7 million, up from 128 million this year, reports eMarketer. It is estimated that by 2014, around 20.7 percent of the world’s population will own a tablet device.

This is to speak nothing of smartphones, which are faring even better around the globe than in the United States. For example, in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, smartphone penetration is much higher (above 80%) than that in the US (roughly 60%), and other Asian territories are catching up quickly. In some parts of these countries, people seem to have skipped the PC revolution completely, moving straight to smartphones and tablets without ever have used a PC.

To recap: the devices are myriad, content creators and developers are putting their best feet forward, and longstanding readers still know and love the brand. So then why haven’t the numbers and profit margins of digital -- the obvious and inevitable solution to print’s downward spiral -- been too encouraging just yet?

In my opinion, the biggest problem in today’s magazine app economy is the lack of a sound engagement strategy. Publishers need a way to ensure that readers spend a lot of time with the content, and have reasons to return to the app everyday - even several times a day - like they do with their social networking apps. In the golden age of print media, engagement was a much simpler game. A physical magazine would lie on the coffee table, next to some other magazines, and the reader would engage himself with one of these few competing titles for hours on end. The notion of having to check if some new pages had magically appeared in one or several of these magazines would have, of course, seemed farcical. But reading patterns and attention spans are dramatically different today: with smartphones and tablets, the digital magazine resides next to hundred of other apps on the device, competing for user’s time not only with other mag apps, but everything from social networking to games to text and email.

So, what to do? Join me again this coming Wednesday for the full rundown!