Touch Press Blog

A short story about The Waste Land for iPad (loosely based on real events!)

The mood on the top floor of Touch Press world headquarters last Tuesday morning was a sombre one. An emergency meeting of the Touch Press COBRA committee had been convened at short notice and, as we shuffled into the board room, we wondered what dreadful thing might have transpired overnight. Had Apple rejected our precious Beethoven’s 9th app? Or might there be some catastrophe with the BIG PROJECT whose name we dare not breathe? The reality was worse, far worse. “A typo has been reported…”, the CEO announced grimly. Little intakes of breathe went around the room; I could see our senior editor visibly pale. “…on the home page of The Waste Land”, he continued. More, and louder, gasps as we all scuttled to grab our iPads. My mouth went dry. The Waste Land had been my baby as lead developer: I’d watched that beautiful home page spring into life dozens of times each day over several weeks as we put together the most recent update. How could I possibly have missed a typo?!

“Can’t anyone see it?” demanded the CEO, as we all frantically scanned the home page desperately not wanting to find this distasteful thing. Always eagle-eyed, the senior designer was, of course, the first to spot it. “I’ve got it”, he announced chirpily. I wanted to throttle him. But there was no denying it; there it was: a genuine typo in all its stark retina horror, right on the home page! Senior execs feverishly polished their glasses and looked again but, like Lady Macbeth’s damned spot, it wouldn’t go away.

To appreciate the significance of this you have to understand a little of the culture in Touch Press. This is the company that hires its own private hyphenator; that prides itself on making sure all its dashes are the correct dashes—the company in which a misplaced apostrophe could mean banishment to work on Android app’s. Even the software engineers fastidiously proof each others’ source code comments. So typos just don’t happen here, and certainly not on the home page of our leading literary app: The Waste Land.

Something must be done about this.

The CEO banged his fist on the table: “We must have a worldwide recall!”, he ordered. Someone gently reminded him that he was no longer running Toyota. The marketing department is always full of ideas and, sure enough, they came up with a good one: we could distribute a sticker to put over the typo. But that idea quickly bit the dust when it was pointed out that we would need both landscape and portrait stickers. The head of Touch Press black ops was summoned: could we perhaps socially engineer an virus that would silently patch the app, and send it to everyone who had The Waste Land?

In the end, of course, the only practical solution will be to fix the typo and submit an update, but this will force everyone who already had the app to download the whole thing again, and all for the sake of flipping no more than a dozen bits. Apple, frustratingly, don’t facilitate incremental updates or patches to apps. So we just have to ‘fess up: yes, there is typo on the home page of The Waste Land, but we’re sure not going to point it out. Go find it if you’re curious! And you never know: rather like those rare postage stamps with errors, this version of the The Waste Land (1.1.0.17387) might in time become a sought-after collector’s item changing hands for $$$ on eBay. Get it while you can.

Together with Faber and Faber, we’ve added a joint reading from Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Irons as well as the capability to add your own notes.

When The Waste Land was first released as an iPad app in June 2011, its publication prompted an editorial in the New York Times. Now, what has come to be a landmark app, has been updated to include a new audio reading by Jeremy Irons and Eileen Atkins, as well as the capability for readers to add their own notes.

The Waste Land is arguably the most revolutionary poem of the twentieth century. First published three years after the end of World War I, Eliot’s poem is known for its commentary on a rapidly changing world.

As well as the complete text of the poem, the app includes interactive features that include expert notes, a specially filmed performance by Fiona Shaw and Eliot’s original annotated manuscript. If you’ve already downloaded the app, the update is free.

Choosing to include another reading in the update, for us, came from the feedback we’d had about the original Waste Land for iPad. Many Waste Land app fans told us that they loved the perfomative nature of the readings, and that this, along with the accompanying notes, helped the poem become much more accessible. As Irons says in this video, “It’s only when you read it aloud that it begins to sing and you begin to understand. It gives me the opportunity to get inside the mind of great poets”.

Lauren Joyce of the Radio Times said on reviewing the Irons and Atkins reading; “Their measured delivery, never overdone, captures the poem’s bleak emotional landscape, breathing life into its panoramic sweep and mundane detail”.

Looking at the history of poetry being read aloud, the fact that The Waste Land for iPad was so successful should have come as no surprise. Poetry originally stems from oral tradition. The app’s success proves that oral poetry is not a fossilised relic of the past but a form of experience that carries through to be enjoyed and celebrated through the most modern of technology. With the mixed media potential that the iPad brings, we can start to appreciate seminal cultural pieces, like The Waste Land, in a different way, finding new layers of experience this sort of poem can bring.

The app’s new trailer

You can download The Waste Land for iPad from the app store here.

Our Orchestra and Elements apps have made it into Apple’s latest ad campaign, and we’re thrilled. For us, the campaign is a landmark in people’s changing ideas around how we can experience culture through technology. 

How do you generally partake in culture? A trip to the theatre, a drawing class, or an afternoon at a museum, perhaps? Until very recently, this type of direct experience was the dominant way to experience passions or discover new ones. However, for us, this Apple ad campaign marks the recognition of and excitement around a different way to partake in a passion; through a computer. In this case, the computer in question, being an iPad.

For this ad campaign, which has both TV and billboard versions, Apple focuses on the wealth of apps available. The display adverts are split into four categories, captioned ‘Ear Opening’ for music lovers, ‘Elementary’ for learning, ‘Well Versed’ for classical music and literature and ‘Mind Watering’, which showcases apps for artists or art lovers. Our Elements app features on the ‘Elementary’ billboard and our Orchestra app is showcased as part of the ‘Well Versed’ category. The television commercial our Orchestra app also features in is here, and The Orchestra features at 00.20 seconds in with the caption ‘Alive’.

The adverts, as a whole, push the point that now you can use an iPad to experience a range of really rich experiences, a large proportion being cultural and creative. One example in the TV ad is learning the basics of playing an instrument. Ten years ago, if you wanted to learn how to play the drums you would need to find, and pay for, a teacher in your local area. Now you can learn and try out the theory and skill via an app. If you were into fashion, to see what were on the fashion week catwalks, you would either have to attempt to wangle a ticket to a show or wait until the next issue of a high fashion magazine arrives in your newsagent. Now there’s a dedicated app, also featured in the adverts, with fashion photography as it happens. In terms of our app, The Elements, if you wanted to play with and learn about every element in periodic table, well then… pre iPad that would have been rather difficult (without, of course visiting one of our co-founders’ periodic table tables!). Now with your iPad and our app, you can look at, play with and learn about the stories of each of the 118 elements wherever and whenever you are.

For us, Apple’s decision to run its latest campaign shows that culture on the iPad is now an exciting, visceral and very real world experience, whatever your passion. Of course, comparing a digital experience with a real life one is impossible; their qualities are completely different. But culture, as an experience in its own right through digital technology has come a long way. The closest thing to it is this type of app’s worthy predecessor; the multimedia CD ROM. We are thrilled about Apple’s latest advert, and being featured in it, because it shows that rich experiences of culture through digital devices have made it to the masses.

A delight to behold – a feast for the eyes, the ears, and the heart.

The Orchestra is quite simply the most beautiful thing my company has ever made. Beautiful in every sense of the word. It’s filled with beautiful music. It’s filled with beautiful images. And it communicates its subject more beautifully than anything I’ve ever seen before.

Anything? Yes, anything.

Sure, there may be more beautiful paintings, more beautiful poems, or more beautiful sunsets. But I’m talking about things whose purpose is to communicate a sizable body of knowledge, to teach me something interesting about the world, to expand my horizons and deepen my understanding. I cannot think of anything, anywhere, in any medium, ever, that has done this as beautifully as the interactive experience we call The Orchestra.

No, seriously, I really mean that. I even mean that it’s more beautiful than my own interactive book, The Elements, which I used to think was pretty hot stuff.

You should be skeptical. After all, I have an interest in convincing you to get a copy of The Orchestra. So let me elaborate (unless you’re sold already, in which case, please, be my guest, get it now and start enjoying).

The first beautiful thing about The Orchestra is the music. For that we thank Haydn, Beethoven, Debussy, Mahler, Stravinsky, and a certain Mr. Berlioz. (Music by these great composers and others was performed for this app by the Philharmonia orchestra, one of the world’s great musical institutions, and also one of its most innovative under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen, a big name in such circles.)

This is music that stirs the heart and lifts the soul like an orphan’s new smile or a really profound piece of chocolate. You might think the best thing you can do with a piece of Beethoven is just listen to it and be glad you are alive. But it gets better. Unlike sausage, you really do want to know how this stuff is made.

In The Orchestra, we play you the music, but we also show it to you in ways that let you see its inner structure and hear it with greater understanding.

First, a traveling score runs across the screen as the music plays. This can be either standard musical notation, or a diagrammatic representation designed to highlight the pure form of the music. You may have seen this kind of thing before, but we’ve tried to do it better. The standard score is exactly the same as the one the musicians and conductor worked from, lovingly typeset by the experts at The Music Sales Group (our other partner in this work). The simplified diagrammatic score is beautifully designed for maximum communication in minimum space.

But the fun really starts with what I call the Blinking Lights Panel. (Others around Touch Press refer to it as the Laser Display Board for obscure British reasons, and officially we’re calling it the BeatMap, but I’m going to stick with calling it the Blinking Lights Panel, because it’s a panel, it’s full of lights, and they blink.)

The BLP is very simple in concept, but tricky in execution and profound in effect. It consists of one dot for each instrument in the orchestra, laid out roughly the way the actual orchestra is, though somewhat stylized and regularized. Any time any instrument group plays a note, the corresponding dots flash, a little or a lot depending on how loudly the note is played, and for how long. Every instrument, every note, perfectly in sync with the sound of the performance.

This is tricky because, even if you have the complete score of the piece, as we do, there’s this annoying fellow called the conductor whose job is to vary the tempo in ways that mean no mechanical interpretation of the score will exactly match the actual performance. But we figured out a clever, scalable way to do precise, beat-by-beat synchronization of the score to the performance.

Precise being the operative word. The human brain has hardware used to coordinate perceptions coming through the eyes with those coming through the ears. Consider for example the ability to pick out and listen to a single conversation in a crowded room. This skill relies critically on watching the face of the speaker: The act of seeing their lips move actually pulls their words out from the background, making them sound louder and clearer than they truly are.

This brain mechanism only works if the synchronization between sight and sound is perfect. And because we have achieved such perfection in The Orchestra, the Blinking Lights Panel allows you to experience this clarifying effect. By watching a particular set of lights when a given instrument is in action, that instrument comes out from the thick of the orchestra and makes itself heard more plainly.

It’s quite a remarkable thing, and if nothing else it’s a fantastic way to learn what each of these different instruments sounds like in the context of the whole orchestra. Even at a live performance it’s often hard to tell exactly which note is coming from which instrument, but in The Orchestra, it’s crystal clear to both your eyes and your ears.

Watching individual dots teaches you about instrument sounds, but watching the whole panel during certain passages puts you in the mind of the composer, almost literally. When I see the different sections firing off in rapid sequence, the sound flashing from side to side, front to back, now here, now there, I am reminded of those remarkable scans of the human brain in action, showing how thoughts flit from region to region as fleetingly as, well, thoughts. I wonder if that’s how Beethoven saw it in his own mind. It’s hard to imagine composing music of such exquisite complexity, with so many moving parts, without having some kind of mental picture of the orchestra laid out with different parts lighting up as their sound is called into action.

Our attempts at visualizing music, at elucidating, tracking, or reflecting its structure in visual patterns, are far from the first such attempts. This kind of thing has been done hundreds of times. We’ve just done it better, that’s all.

Beyond symbolic representations of music, The Orchestra includes very concrete ones in the form of complete video tracks for each of the eight pieces: One camera always on Esa-Pekka Salonen’s conducting, and two cameras on key performers, moving from instrument to instrument as the melody shifts around the orchestra. And the app contains a full book’s worth of text by Mark Swed (classical music critic for the LA Times) describing the music, the composers, the instruments, and the orchestra. And running commentary from both the conductor and the musicians during every piece. And separate audio tracks that let you listen to each section of the orchestra individually, as if you were walking around the performers while they play. Normally each of these would be headline features, but there’s just so much in this product that they rate only a sentence each.

If The Orchestra contained just the eight performance sections I’ve described, with all their richly layered content, it would be a fantastic product. But we didn’t just create a fantastic product, we created The Most Beautiful Educational Experience Ever. There’s more.

Right off the home page is a gloriously lush jewel box of a page that shows off the major instruments of the orchestra lovingly photographed and marvelously rotating all at once. (Those of you who have seen our previous products will recognize this look from many of our titles. But it’s never been as beautiful as in The Orchestra.)

And when I say lovingly photographed, I mean we photographed over thirty of the Philharmonia’s own instruments, nearly always under the nervous and watchful eye of their musician-owner. Yes, we hung a million dollar violin on a loop of fishing line suspended from a rotating motor, and we did not drop it. We put an 8-foot wide marimba and a full-sized harp on my custom-built large-object turntable. We did absolutely everything except a concert grand piano. I draw the line at pianos, not because we couldn’t do one, but because you have to draw the line somewhere, and I rather it be at pianos than Blue Whales.

Many of these instruments are gorgeous works of art in their own right, but of course they are meant to be played, so for each instrument we have both the rotating image (which you can control with your own finger) and a video showing one of the Philharmonia’s musicians putting it through its paces.

It’s quite a remarkable thing to listen to, say, the viola being bowed and plucked and knocked in various ways, and realize that this is one of the best viola players in the world giving you a fun and very personal introduction to the instrument he’s spent a lifetime mastering.

And if that weren’t enough under the description of each instrument you will find a virtual piano keyboard spanning the full range that instrument is capable of. Touch any key and you will hear that instrument paying that note. Not some kind of synthesizer, an actual individual recording of a world-class musician playing that specific note on an instrument that may be three hundred years old.

I don’t know if The Orchestra will be around in three hundred years, but I do know that this year, it’s the most beautiful tribute to the art and craft of the orchestra there is, bar none and by a wide margin. I invite you to take a look.

A young visitor was very excited to meet Theo yesterday. He bounded into the office holding something shiny in his hand: ‘I’ve been expecting you Theodore,’ he said. Opening his hand he revealed a large and wonderful bismuth crystal which Theo told him was more impressive than any he had ever made. He wandered around the office wide-eyed and, when he came across a periodic table poster, chirped: ‘Wow, is that all of the elements?’

Theo then invited him to play with his new toy – a spiralling 3D periodic table which eliminates the misleading gaps found in the traditional 2D variety. Needless to say the young man was thrilled to bits.

 Meet the Author: Michael Morpurgo

Saturday 24th November, 5pm.
Apple Store, 235 Regent Street, London W1B 2EL

All of those who’ve seen children’s author, Michael Morpurgo, and his performance of War Horse in our new app will know how good he is in front of a crowd. An engaging storyteller, he wraps you into a tale and holds your attention to the very end. He’s had a fascinating life, training in the army and working as a teacher before being inspired to write children’s books, of which he has now produced over 100. Michael was appointed the Children’s Laureate between 2003 and 2005, a position that officially recognised his contribution to children’s literature, and now dedicates much of his time to Farms for City Children, the charity farm he runs in Devon with his wife Clare.

However, you don’t need to listen to us tell you about his life and work – he can do it himself. Michael has been invited to speak at the Apple Store in Regent Street, London to introduce War Horse for iPad, and talk about his books with Suzy Klein (Radio 3). A WWI expert from the National Army Museum will also be on hand, with a Touch Press model in 1914 soldier’s uniform, to explore the life of a soldier in the trenches. Children of all ages are very welcome, and there will be an opportunity to ask Michael any questions you have.

Join the Facebook event, where we’ll be posting pictures and videos to inspire your questions, like this one, where Michael talks about one of his inspirations for writing War Horse. We’re looking forward to seeing you on Saturday.

Michael Morpurgo ‘The Fate of War Horses’ from Touch Press on Vimeo.

November 11 was Remembrance Sunday in Britain and Veteran’s Day in the US. Whatever they chose to call it, people around the world honoured those who lost their lives in the First World War, and the conflicts that followed. Destruction was the war’s predominant force, but creation had a place too: During the war a man named Frank Conrad built an aeroplane radio for the Allies, and began broadcasting the first commercial radio station from a factory rooftop in Pennsylvania.

Rotational photography is an innovation that, for some, made the iPad make sense. For many, Frank Hurley’s innovative photography made a degree of sense out of Antarctica. The Australian was part of a 1914 attempt, led by Ernest Shackleton, to walk across the frozen continent for the first time. The mainly British team set off aboard the HMS Endurance with their national pride still reeling at the loss of the race to the South Pole. (Captain Scott had got there in 1911 only to be greeted by a Norwegian flag that had been erected days before by his arch-rival, Roald Amundsen.)

Setting off as Europe plunged into war, Shackleton became marooned for 20 months in heavy pack ice just north of Antarctica. By sheltering underneath two support boats, by eating penguins, and by sheer pluck all 28 of his men withstood the cold and escaped alive. Hurley turned his lengthy scrape with death into a dazzling opportunity, telling the tale through breathtaking photos, some of which he gave colour to using a labour-intensive method known as the Paget process.

Hurley then went from (as Shackleton put it) ‘the white warfare of the South’ to the ‘Red fields of France and Flanders’ where he acted as the official photographer for the Australian Imperial Force. Mirroring the experience of life there, the photos he took during his two years in and around the Western Front were bleak, harrowing, absurd, humorous, action-packed, and more than a little unreal. Ever the innovator, Hurley created some of his images as composites, by placing negatives one on top of the other, so as to include a low-flying aeroplane or a dramatic explosion.

Fifteen of Hurley’s photographs grace the historical timeline of our War Horse app, where they lend eery immediacy to the Battles of Ypres theme (see above) and unchanging beauty to ‘Shackleton’s ship stuck in ice’ (see top of page).

- An exhibition, “The Photographs of Frank Hurley”, is running at the Ralls Collection, 1516 31st Street, Washington, DC, until November 27.

- A web page on Hurley’s 1914–16 expedition

- A showcase of his life and porfolio, with moving classical music

- An exhibition of his Antarctic photography ended in April at the Queen’s Gallery in London – the site of the Leonardo Da Vinci: Anatomist exhibition, for which Touch Press produced an app

We’ve brought a few literary titles to digital form now, but War Horse is the first full, fictional novel that has been given the Touch Press treatment. And what a novel it is. Moving, hopeful, and beautifully written by Michael Morpurgo, a wonderful story teller, it’s no wonder that it’s had phenomenal success as both a film and a play in the West End and on Broadway.

One of the influences for the novel was the Devonshire village where Michael lives, as, like in villages up and down the country and all over the world, in 1914 many young men enlisted to take part in a war that changed history forever. We worked with Michael to bring out much of the research that went into writing the book, so that alongside the complete and unabridged novel and audiobook, you can explore an interactive timeline of WWI and watch Michael and other First World War experts introducing topics such as the use of tanks, life in the trenches, and the role of horses from 1914-1918.

However, as much as we can wax lyrical about the features we’ve included, there’s no one better to present the app than Michael himself. Take a look at his introduction and guided tour, and keep your ears and eyes peeled for more exciting War Horse announcements.

Michael Morpurgo’s Introduction from Touch Press on Vimeo.

Michael Morpurgo’s Guided Tour from Touch Press on Vimeo.

One of our engineers has just come back from a great trip to the states, bringing with him armfuls of Milk Duds and Reeses Pieces to everyone’s delight (and eventual queasiness). This inordinate amount of sugar in Warple Mews means only one thing, and so in the spirit of Halloween I’ve been having a look into some of the scariest and strangest specimens in our Skulls title. The teeth of the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake and the Red-Bellied Piranha are a little unnerving, but I think that’s nothing compared to the eerie bone smile of the Nile Crocodile.

Creepy. However, there are some absolutely fascinating skulls in this title, like this Gila Monster, whose skulls is covered in raised epidermal knobs. Or the Atlantic Wolffish, who eats crabs and urchins and so has boney structures in its mouth to crush shells to digest them. If you’re a fan of David Attenborough and nature programmes, this is a title you’ll loose yourself in. And alongside the 3D rotations of skulls, Simon Winchester gives a fascinating account of the iconography of skulls in history and culture. Alas, poor Yorick, he was one of many skulls held and used to reflect upon mortality after the drawings of the anatomist Vesalius.

Luckily it’s not all skeletons and ghoulish creatures here, and we had some good news today. We’ve stormed the FutureBook Innovation Awards shortlist where three of our titles feature – The Sonnets in the Best Adult App category, Barefoot World Atlas in the Best Kids App category, and Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy coming through in the Reference Book Apps. We’re chuffed to feature, and think the fantastic titles and campaigns that have also been shortlisted demonstrate what an incredibly dynamic industry we’re working in. The full shortlist is up on the FutureBook website, and it’s well worth a look.

So December 3rd, the date of the FutureBook conference and the awards ceremony is firmly in our diary. A date for you is this Friday when the Skulls special Halloween price promotion ends – get on clicking and this guy wishes you a fantastic All Hallows Eve (voted the most Halloween-y by everyone here). Enjoy.

Did you spot us last night? It looks like Barefoot World Atlas has already taken iPad mini for a spin…

Like many of you around the world, we tuned in to watch the unveiling of the long anticipated addition to the iPad family. As was widely expected, its display isn’t Retina, but it is small enough to hold in your palm, which is great for getting the most of hands-on apps like Atlas.

Interestingly, there’s been mention in the press that this device is more suited to women rather than men as it’s smaller (following half of the saying “shrink it and pink it”), yet several of us in the office felt that actually this was a little misrepresentative. Being thinner as well as smaller, it could fit in a large coat pocket. Maybe some of the boys here have larger coat pockets than most.