News Anchor

From Conception to Completion

Sasmito Adibowo
Basil Salad Soft ware
15-Mar-2010
What is News Anchor
Feed reader (ATOM/RSS) application.
Virtual newscaster.
Voice text (text-to-speech).
Accessible for low-vision users.
Mac OS X (10.5 and up).
http://NewsAnchorMac.com
News Anchor
Screenshot
What this is all about
News Anchor’s product design story
Background
Problem statement
Competing products
Design Decisions
 Background
The inspiring situation
Foreign worker in Singapore.
Renting a room (home-stay style).
Doesn’t have television (space issues).
Uses a laptop for almost everything.
 Problem

Keeping up with the news while juggling

t wo jobs.
(primary job and iPhone/Mac stuff)
Watches news primarily during breakfast
or commuting.
 Potential Solutions

Portable television
FM Radio
Video podcasts
Feed (RSS) readers
 Slight Deviation

Some theory that explains the thinking

process...
Active & Passive Media
“Passive” Media “Active” Media

“Pushed” by “Pull” by consumers.

content providers
Actively seeking
Passively receiving and selecting
content content.

One size fits all Highly customized

Ex: TV, Radio Ex: Internet Search

 Active Media
Advantages
You get what you’re looking for.
Higher relevancy to your interests.
Disadvantages
You don’t get what you’re not looking for.
Searching is time-consuming.
 Middle Ground

Combining “Passive” & “Active” media

You get some control over content.
You don’t need to search every time.
Some important and relevant content
are “pushed” to you.
 Middle Ground -
Examples
Podcasts (video & audio).
Feed subscriptions (RSS/ATOM).
Social net work chatter & “t weets”
Google Buzz (?)
 Back to Main Topic
I needed a compromise bet ween “active”
media and “passive” media for daily news
consumption activities.
“Passive” media doesn’t have many of the
content I’m interested in.
“Active” media takes a lot of manual
effort which takes away some of my
breakfast time.
Path to Solution - 1 of 4
Video Podcast – ABC World News by
Charles Gibson (at that time)
Good: pretty decent “world” news.
Bad: often t wo days late and available
only after 7 AM (Singapore time).
Bad: often too US-centric (naturally).
Path to Solution - 2 of 4
Feed reading – Google Reader
Good: relevant content (the way I set up
my feeds).
Bad: I have to click for every news
article that I want to read – not
convenient to read news during
breakfast.
Path to Solution – 3 of 4

Feed reading – Times for OS X

Better: Times presents a number of
articles in the same screen and let me
easily read most of them.
Not good enough: I still have to click to
move from articles to articles.
The Solution – 4 of 4
Something similar to the “world news
webcast” (video podcast) but with
customizable content.
Doesn’t require a lot of clicks for day-to-
day operation (other wise I risk spilling my
breakfast onto my laptop).
RSS/ATOM feeds are good enough as news
data sources.
 The Competitors
As of second quarter 2009

NewsHawker – Sugar Maple Soft ware

Noodle Reader – Sonic Amigos
News At Seven – Northwestern
University
 Competitor -
NewsHawker
Works with
NetNewsWire

Simple, faceless
RSS reading.

Doesn’t work
when I tested it.
 Competitor -
Noodle Reader
Reads the weather or
news articles that
you’ve pasted.

Sophisticated but
complex user interface
and requires a lot of
manual intervention.

Officially de-supported
as of 2008
 Competitor -
News At Seven
Very high-tech concept: an artificial intelligence (AI)
soft ware will browse the web and present news in a
talk show format.
Received mainstream media coverage at the time of
launch (back in 2006).
University project, government funded, no “real”
product for consumers as of Q2 2009.
 Product Definition
A feed reader application. User-
configurable by t weaking the feeds. No AI
required.
Minimal intervention. Ideally like playing
a podcast, only requires one or t wo clicks.
Something “unique” so that it can carve a
nice niche.
 Design Decisions
Follow the “News Broadcast” format.
An already successful format since the dawn
of television.
Primarily text-to-speech with some animation.
Let the user compose “channels” which are
amalgamation of feed articles.
Automatically generate “episodes” from those
channels.
 Platform Decision
Mac OS X

Passing knowledge from previous iPhone development

experience.

Quartz Composer – easily prototype the animation

module.

Text-to-speech voice “Alex” is finally good enough.

All other developers are looking at the iPad – less

competition.

More powerful CPU compared to the iPhone or iPad.

 Data Entities
Primary entities: Feeds and Channels.
Feed – an RSS feed and the articles that
make up the feeds.
Channel – a collection of RSS feeds that
defines the setup for a presentation.
Feed articles are collected and processed
automatically to make channel episodes.
 Data Diagram
assigned to
feed channel
0..n 0..n

1..1 1..1

contained in generated by

0..n 0..n

1..n consists of 0..1

article episode
 Data Diagram -
Explained
A feed is assigned to a number of
channels.
Periodically the channel will take the
specified number of articles from each
assigned feed (as according to the
channel) and make it an “episode”.
The episode is the “news broadcast” as
presented to the user.
Technical Architecture
Primarily an Objective-C application.
The news show display is rendered by a Quartz
Composer component (via an embedded QTZ file).
Multi-core ready (uses parallel threads via
NSOperationQueue)
Data management via Core Data with SQLite data
store
Universal Binary – PowerPC compatible
 More Information
Product website
http://NewsAnchorMac.com
Company website
http://basil-salad.com
Contact
support (at) basil-salad dot com