iOS Anyone know how Flipbook works?

[mrl72]

I heard they render their pages on their server and then display them on the page/screen which makes me think they are just sending back HTML to a UIWebview element. That doesn't seem to be very efficient to me (the fact they've had server problems leads me to believe they are doing it this way). Wouldn't there be an easier way to do the content parsing and page rendering therefore pushing the load to the app instead of the server? Reason I ask is I'm looking into a magazine like app to be used internally for our company and I'm looking at the most efficient way to do this.

Cheers.

 

[jnoxx]

They're actually illegally scraping some content, but they worked on this project for over 6 months with like 20 people, including an person from the original iPhone OS software team. I have made an topic about this a while back.
Basically, they scrape the content, and will parse it for you, and send back the content, and display that the way they want, this is really intensive for their servers, but it's how they roll.. (I think their business model is in giving the content they parse through 3rd party stuff, who check what you like for ads).

 

[Reason077]

They're actually illegally scraping some content

Well, when Flipboard first came out they got in some trouble for using some content without permission.

Now, though, I think everything you see in Flipboard falls in to one of the following categories:

1. things like RSS feeds, which implicitly allow embedding
   
2. scraped content with just a summary of an article, with a link to the full article that opens in a separate Web view, or
   
3. from content providers that they have licensing deals with (such as the Telegraph and the New York Times) which typically include ads.

So, I think these days they're being pretty careful to respect publishers rights. Nothing dodgy going on - at least no more dodgy than Google!