Skeumorphic approach to digital user interface was Steve Jobs' favorite direction, though rising passionated debates at Apple, internally.

Spiritual Jobs' son, Scott Forstall, continued in this direction after the death of Jobs, but his most prominent contradictor was Jonathan Ive, who, eventually, took over Scott's responsabilities making Scott resigning from Apple.

We now see the first public evidence of the reorientation to the Ive's take on flat design originally initiated by Microsoft Windows 8 Modern UI approach to user interface ringing the knell of digital skeumorphism.

See how Apple Podcasts application on iOS just droped it's skuemorphic skin:

¹ Legend : on the left, new flat design, on the right, former skeumorphic design

Bye bye idealism, welcome nihilism: Nietzsche told us about all this, long ago.

Digital world is eaten by physical world: impossibility now becomes impossible. Even there.

End of 2012 is very weird here. We prepared a very nice brand new version v1.9.8 with tons of features and improvement plus a gorgeous new xmas brand new theme, but alas, you won't have it!

We struggle with Apple in order to make them validate our app, but they bloc it for some reasons. And frankly, we won't pass through this year. See you next year anyway, with a solution.

Happy new stand 2013!

I am happy to introduce the new v1.9.6 version which gives access to our users to more than 150 italian magazines.

In addition, lekiosk is also given a new italian theme for you to enjoy!

Welcome back to our new 100% cloud supported infrastructure!

À nous les petites anglaises!

Since we rethought almost everything to migrate our platform to Microsoft Azure, it's time to address international market, stating today with the UK.

Of course, I also did dramatically rethought our app to make it multi region capable.

A brand new 3D newsstand

Both UK specifics contents and theme are now available to any user out there.

Support for multi languages, offers and currencies

The app is now capable t support multi languages and exposes specific offer to the UK people: 10 magazines per month for only £9.99.

You know what? We have launched the iPhone version, and guess… we've got 17 times the traffic we had last xmas!

The results? Boom!

Many nights running people at the datacenter with screwers, quickly trying to install new servers while at the other hand, I was forced to keep iPhone users off the service.

Enough is enough: classical datacenter is a dead end. I need cloud computing now!

Platform team started to convert all the platform to active Cloud comuting. I chose Microsoft Azure as a natural provider as we run .Net software all over the platform.

See you in a few weeks…

Since the begging, our main and only target was the iPad. Though we're doing well on the tablet, the addressable market is way smaller than the iPhone market. There's no reasons why we shouldn't address the smartphones.

We need one app and support both iPad and iPhone.

Smaller, it changes all

It's no question to simply scale down the app views, including the 3D newsstand view. Your fingers are not going to make it to tap accurately the magazines. Nor your eyes are going to aim at them comfortably.

Change everything, but keep it as it is!

Yes. A bit mind twisting!

The requirements: The 3D must stand. The mags must be big enough to taped and watched comfortably. And we must show as many as magazines as we can.

Ok. The solution: we keep the 3D Model, but derives a special version for the iPhone that sports only one row of mags. And to display more than the screen can contains, we make it scrolling, within the shelter of the newsstand.

One more thing…

Oh, by the way. We now support portrait mode for both iPhone and iPad (iPad version below).