Zaandam, The Netherlands – When Apple launched the iPad in Hong Kong on July 23, Hong Kong's leading English language newspaper, the South China Morning Post (SCMP), seized the opportunity by launching its app on the same day. This timely move was made possible thanks to its partnership with WoodWing Asia Pacific enabling the South China Morning Post to become the first Asian English daily newspaper with a native iPad app.

"The premiere of our iPad app demonstrates our firm belief in serving our readers through a broad variety of channels," says Steven Tan, Executive Advisor, SCMP Group Ltd. "Furthermore, our goal is to become the unequivocal authoritative source for English-language information about Hong Kong and China, and the iPad edition allows us to do so for a global audience."

The SCMP iPad app became the second most popular app in the Hong Kong App Store on its debut day, with more than 3,000 downloads from Hong Kong, China, the USA and other locations around the world. Currently offered free of charge for a limited trial period, the app has daily editions from Monday to Saturday.

The app is made using XML feeds and images from the proprietary CCI editorial system, managed in dossiers in WoodWing Enterprise and placed efficiently via drag-and-drop into Adobe InDesign templates. WoodWing's iPad tools are used in conjunction with WoodWing's efficiency tools Smart Layout and Smart Styles.

First published in 1903, the South China Morning Post is an award-winning newspaper with a daily circulation of 100,860. Its combined readership of 376,000 includes its Sunday edition, Sunday Morning Post, and its online edition, scmp.com, which launched in 1996 and converted to the region's first fully paid subscription access site in 2004. Today, scmp.com has more than 19,000 subscribers and 20 million page views per month. The new iPad edition further enhances the SCMP portfolio and caters for the global appetite for quality China news reporting.

Third Asian newspaper in just six weeks
The South China Morning Post is the third newspaper in Asia to go live using WoodWing's iPad Tools in the period of just six weeks. The Mainichi Shimbun in Japan launched the PhotoJ. app in May and Kompas Gramedia in Indonesia launched its Kompas daily app in June.

"SCMP was looking for a high-quality, scalable, and affordable solution that could be implemented quickly as the iPad launch in Hong Kong was getting close," said Remco Koster, Managing Director for WoodWing Asia Pacific. "SCMP sent two employees to a two-day iPad workshop we held at our office in Malaysia. And just four weeks after the workshop the SCMP iPad app was ready for sale on the 23rd of July. This shows how fast decisions are made at SCMP and how quickly Enterprise and our iPad solution can be deployed."

"Serioustec did a great job helping us out in the template design and our iPad edition production the first couple of days," said Etienne Maccario, South China Morning Post's Deputy Digital Director. "The editorial and digital teams are very excited about this new channel and the feedback from the public has been excellent."

After the WoodWing iPad workshop, things went very fast. "We had to create the templates, to configure the workflow and to set-up the CCI XML export," said John Fong, CEO of Serioustec. "In addition the iPad app customizations needed to be done to get the iPad app submitted to Apple to be approved in time for the iPad launch. It was a great moment once we saw the app being available including the first issue on the 23rd July."