Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the Royal Irish Academy has partnered with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite to produce the interactive app, “A History of Ireland in 100 Objects.” Featuring embedded video, audio, animation, and photos, the app is a celebration of the historical relevance of the country and its past, while also highlighting it “ascension to the Presidency to the Council of the European Union.”
“Fintan O’Toole, a journalist from The Irish Times, launched the project in 2011 with a series of newspaper columns highlighting 100 objects from Ireland, the UK and Norway that connect with Ireland’s rich past,” writes Joe Zeff, whose design firm produced the app, in a blog post from Adobe. “Those columns became a hardcover book, and that book became the series of apps that we designed and developed for multiple platforms using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.”
This plan to work with Adobe paid off for the RIA, as the app is now seamlessly formatted for all mobile devices on the iOS and Android platform. What is particularly interesting about the creation of this app–and hopefully of many more apps to come from a variety of historical sources–is that formatting it for smartphones makes it possible for museum patrons to use the app while touring museums and historical collections, benefiting from the abundance of information available through video and audio narration.
The app is free for download until March 31, 2013 and is a project of the Royal Irish Academy, the National Museum of Ireland and The Irish Times supported by the Presidency of the European Council of the European Union and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland. Download the iPad/iPhone app, the Kindle Fire app, or the Android tablet app here.
To preview a video of the app, go to https://vimeo.com/60563627
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.