Lots of buzz today on the Web about "Push Pop Press". What? Who?
Not much on the official website for the moment, except for this short introduction: " Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface. Our first title will be available for iPad and iPhone later this year. We can't wait to share it with you."
Ok, just another digital book maker on the way I thought.
So why all the fuss surrounding Push Pop Press? It turns out the start-up was founded in February 2010 by a team that includes Mike Matas, who joined Apple as a designer at 19 (!); Kimon Tsinteris, formerly a senior engineer on the iPhone team, and Austin Sarner, an applications developer (AppZapper, Disco,...).
Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball had the oppportunity to try Push Pop Press, you can read his full feedback here:
"What I saw (and used) was a multimedia-rich book running on an iPhone 4. There is no UI chrome. No status bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom. It’s just like you see in the still image on their teaser site. The entire screen is filled by content, not user interface elements. The screen is the book, the book is the screen.
You use it almost entirely by swiping and pinching. [...] In Push Pop’s books, [...] to play a video, you just tap play and it plays in place. If you want to play it full-screen, you pinch it out. Pinch back in to go back to the book layout. [...]
And, as they say, there’s a physics engine in place, which gives all the elements on screen a certain heft as you swipe and pinch them. It doesn’t just feel like a game — it feels like an exquisitely crafted game.
Performance is achingly smooth. E.g., when you zoom out or in on a video, the zooming tracks the pinching of your fingers precisely and instantly. Do the pinch fast — more like a popping pinch-flick — and the zoom expansion will respond accordingly and pop the element into full-screen size. Think about how the standard iOS list controls have a momentum-based feel to them — like when you flick them to scroll quickly, or the bounce when you hit the top or bottom. That’s what Push Pop’s UI feels like, except it’s for everything — page-turning, image/video zooming, everything.
The format of their “books” is not HTML or anything like ePub (the format Apple uses for iBooks books). Push Pop’s books are native Cocoa Touch iOS apps. I’ve seen some cool stuff rendered through WebKit, but never anything like this in terms of smoothness, precision, and the lack of latency between touch gestures and on-screen responsiveness. “Pages” look more like they were laid-out by a designer than randomly rendered by a web browser."
If the name "Mike Matas" doesn't ring a bell, I strongly advise you to go check out Mike Matas website.
He is best known for designing key parts of Mac OS X and iPhone. he joined Apple at age 19 (what were we doing at 19?), after creating the media management tool Delicious Library. He’s even been listed as co-inventor on patents Apple has filed.
By the way, it turns out the guy is only 24 and wikipedia points out that " he never attended college".
"Formal schooling ended for me half way through my senior year of high school when I decided to drop out so I could focus on starting up Delicious Monster. Although that’s obviously not to say my education stopped there. I’m educated every day by the places and things I surround myself with, and the people I collaborated with. " Matas says. You can read the full (and very interesting) interview of Mike Matas on Cocoia Blog.
I really can't wait to see how Push Pop Press turns out !
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