Inside peek: Making the USA Today iPad app work

There is a great post over at the Lost Change blog about the amount of change that took place to make USA Today’s new iPad app work. I won’t go into what I think about the app as I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. However, there is a level of insight into what it takes to make these apps work that is enlightening for those unfamiliar with the process.

Many people who haven’t had the joy of bringing a media entity onto a new platform simply don’t understand the hurdles that exist to getting it right. The content just doesn’t port itself over into these shiny app experiences that people have grown accustom to. It takes time, effort and collaboration.

The last time these hurdles of this magnitude were cleared, media empires were making their way onto the web. That was nearly two decades ago.

In less than two years, things like the iPhone and its App Store have pushed both content providers and competition to step up and change the way they were doing business at a speed that was previously unheard of.

In 2007, the changes that USA Today made to get their iPad app done didn’t happen. In 2010, it happens damn near overnight.

That, my friends, may be the biggest way the iPhone has impacted our lives and I can only hope that the fundamental change in how we do business it spawned will live on long after we have forgotten what an iPhone was.