Now, here's our first app (and not just because it's called Composition No. 1)

18 July 2011

We have just signed off our first ever… and we’re very excited. Ecstatic in fact. It’s not just the printed edition of Composition No. 1 (we’re totally head over heels in love with), which is our third book after all. No, our real first here is our iPad app for Composition No. 1.

It’s a really playful app, which we, for what it’s worth, have a full-on crush on. Designed by Universal Everything who also designed the book, it’s our first because:

a) well, we’ve never ever done an app before but this book begged to have one

b) it’s a new platform for us to champion great looking stories in a way that lets you have a different experience to what’s already out there.

You see, we never wanted to do an app simply because everyone else is at it. And let’s face it a lot of people are. That would be a waste of money we haven’t got, and a wasteful opportunity too. When even the UK Apprentice has a Do Your Own App episode, and Apple reckons they now have more app downloads than music downloads, then there’s rather a lot of apps already out there. And just like our printed stories: we feel like we’ve got to have a damn good reason to produce them.

So, our Composition No. 1 app is not just a copy of the book on screen. Far from it. And it hasn’t got those curly cornered pages (we never got the idea of those, it isn’t a book made of paper so why pretend to be one?). It’s a book app inspired by the squeak feeling we had when we first saw two of our faves: Alice for the iPad that came out about a year ago and the Myfry with all its rotating wonderous madness.

Ours is, we hope, an app that is deeply rooted in the book. And it does stuff on screen you just can’t do in print. For Composition No. 1, that means it’s about taking away the sense of preciousness that the loose pages in the printed book makes you feel. So where we, the readers, in the printed edition end up having to force ourselves to shuffle and “mess up” the book at random, in the app version, the opposite is true. The randomising is actually forced upon us. Here, the pages shuffle and they shuffle at a serious speed. And it’s up to us, the readers, to have to make it stop.

As we said, we are totally in love with it, can’t stop playing with it, but we cannot wait to hear what you make of it, too. Shared crush? Fingers crossed and here’s to begging and hoping :)

11th August is our date day.

X

A+B

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