One of the most talked-about apps of the year has been Flipboard, the iPad app that reformats online content as a magazine. Now a new startup called Treesaver aims to bring beautiful magazine-style designs to the Web.
Treesaver is building a library of customisable templates that will allow publishers to create beautiful online reading experiences. Dividing content into pages that automatically adjusts to the size of the screen, Treesaver will work on any device with a web browser. Because it uses standard Web technologies – HTML, CSS and JavaScript – there are no plugins required.
If you want to see what’s possible, the company is already producing weekly magazines from Nomad Editions as Chrome apps. While you probably wouldn’t want to see every website to adopt magazine formatting, text-heavy services like news websites and blogs could benefit from the idea and it’s definitely preferable to closed-up iPad apps when it comes to reading the latest news on a tablet device.
Treesaver is pushing the concept as a boon for publishers who won’t have to create dedicated apps for different platforms in order to present their content in an easy-to-use magazine format. it’s also being pushed as a “friendlier” format for advertising, presumably because design aesthetics aside you won’t be able to block them.
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Treesaver will soon be releasing a set of templates for publishers to use and the technology will be open sourced, allowing anyone to customise the idea as they choose.
We discovered Treesaver via Robert Scoble’s video interview with one of its founders, former Microsofter Filipe Fortes. At 35 minutes, it’s long but well worth sitting back and watching.
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