#20mobile

[mobilefirstnews]

How to Use an Apple TV and an iPad/iPhone to show your mobile products in daily meetings.

If your news organization has daily editorial meetings where your desktop website is projected onto a TV or screen and discussed, then you should also be showing your mobile platforms at these meetings. 

Here's the set up we use at CNN to show our mobile website, iPhone app and iPad app at our daily editorial meetings. 

What you will need

AppleTV ($100)

iPhone 4S or higher and/or iPad 2 or higher

If you are going to permanently leave an iPad or iPhone in the conference room, you should buy some kind of case or cable to lock it to the desk so nobody steals it. We use this Kensington SecureBack Security Case and Lock. 

Once all the equipment is in place, just wirelessly mirror your iPad or iPhone screen to the AppleTV via AirPlay so you can show your apps and mobile website.

Photo showing the setup at CNN Digital's daily editorial meeting. The TV on the right shows the CNN iPad projected via an AppleTV

Besides projecting from the iPad chained to the desk, your colleagues can also do wirelessly mirroring from their own iOS devices as long as they are on the same Wi-Fi network as the AppleTV.

While this setup is for iOS only, I'm hopeful that Google will enable wireless mirroring from Android apps to Google Chromecast. 

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta. 

[mobilefirstnews]

How to set up app emulators on the big screens in your newsroom.

The best way to see what's happening on your news organization's mobile app is actually to use it on a device. 

But since lots of newsrooms like to project their metrics or desktop home pages onto big screens so everyone can see, here's a way to project your iPhone and iPad apps onto a big screen and have them run automatically so people sitting at their desks or passing by can see what's happening on your apps. 

What you'll need

A Mac mini and an HDMI cable

A big screen TV or monitor with HDMI input (You may want to consider a vertical TV or monitor)

An iOS developer who can build this for you

At CNN we have two of these emulators, one running on a vertical monitor and another running on a regular HDTV. 

Our emulators show our iPhone app and our iPad app. They open the home screen and slowly scroll up and down a few times so someone watching it can get a good idea of all the content inside the home section. You can set it to open up other sections if you want.

Our emulators also allow someone to use the computer's mouse to stop the automated loop and go to a specific story or section just like they would if they were using our app on a phone or an iPad.

I'm not a developer so I can't explain all of the details of how they were built, but I know that our developer used Xcode and iOS simulator to build it, and then terminal on the Mac to control it automatically. 

Here's a video of one of our CNN emulators in action

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta. 

[mobilefirstnews]

How to use the Reflector app so you can project mobile whenever needed

Don't walk, run to download the Reflector App on your Mac or PC.

This is the best $13 you will ever spend!

It's a program that lets you wirelessly project your iPhone or iPad to a Mac or PC. It works very similar to the AppleTV set up, but it's got a lot more features. For instance, you use it to record video of your app in action.

This is great for demos, use as b-roll on TV or just showing someone how your app works. At CNN, we used Reflector to show people how they could vote for the 2013 CNN Hero of the Year inside of the CNN iPad app. 

It's also great for internal presentations because all your need is a computer connected to a TV or projector to show your apps. And you can run multiple devices at one so you can compare how they look. 

This tip was first presented as part of the “20 Tips to Turbocharge Your Mobile Efforts (Before It’s Too Late)” panel at the 2013 Online News Association Conference in Atlanta.