News Corp’s The Daily, an iPad magazine that’s been heralded as the beginning of the digital magazine age, is rumoured to be on route to the App Store with an arrival date of January 19th.
There’s been a lot of buzz circling the new-age magazine, as well as other magazines, but this one has some special appeal—Apple’s been working closely with the Murdoch gang. Conde Naste’s Wired application set the original bar for digital magazine expectations, but a lot of people think that The Daily will push the boundaries even further.
Some expect that Apple will announce a recurring payments and automated distribution model in an announcement with News Corp. Background downloads have been on the top of many digital content providers’ lists, but none have really fulfilled their wishes. Richard Branson’s Project had some lofty goals that were spoken about quite publicly, but have yet to be delivered. It’s unknown if Branson’s expectations and public statements had anything to do with the upcoming model, or if the lack of updates has anything to do with the potential background downloads still being missing from official APIs.
That being said, Apple is not entirely blocking background updates from occurring within applications. Just today, Amazon updated their Kindle application to allow it to complete downloads in the background, but not start them.
