For the past several months, t.o.night has been working on an iPad app so our commuting readership can still grab a copy of the nightly newspaper even if they happen to miss the physical copy.

The majority of our distribution thus far tends to occur between 3:30-6:00 as people in the downtown core leave their offices and head for Union Station – the bulk of this through our fleet of newsie handlers who physical hand the paper to commuters as they walk past, though additionally through our distribution boxes at most of the subway stations across the city and our underground PATH billboards.

The iPad app was a must-requested offering, and now commuters can read the day’s issue of the paper even if they happen to miss the handout period (because they’re commuting either before or after the timeframe) or reach boxes after they’re empty and haven’t yet been refilled.

Curiously enough, iPad apps are an entirely different monster than iPhone apps… both have to be coded separately and in some cases a large chunk of the code is not portable to the other platform even though they’re both developed by Apple – something I never even considered a possibility.

There were a few snags in the process, but ultimately everything worked out in the end – these are a few of the ads I built to run in the publication to advertise the new app. I designed the icon first (which also ended up in the App store) and then created a custom tonight iPad app logo. The blue/green circle I used as a highlight in some of the ads is a little reminiscent of the “loading circle” in Windows 7 that replaced the hourglass (or the beachball of death in MacOS) – kinda my little cross OS jab at Apple (for the uninitiated: as a custom computer builder and power user I’m not a fan of Macs).