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• Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger introduces the new Guardian iPad app • A free trial is now available from the App Store For those of you addicted to print, the Guardian just got smaller. For those of you wedded to reading the paper on your mobile phone it just got bigger. Welcome to the Guardian iPad edition. Size matters. Some Guardian readers want to be able to spread the paper across the breakfast table and browse it. Others, crammed like sardines into a commuter train or bus, need to be able to read the “paper” on a very small screen. More than 15 million people worldwide now own an iPad, and a good proportion of them want something that not just fits their screen, but has been designed with it in mind. Step forward Mark Porter, the designer of the Berliner-format Guardian newspaper and considered by many of his peers to be the most thoughtful and elegant news designer in the business. He led an in-house team of digital and print designers and developers who worked out how to transform the appearance and ordering of a newspaper so that it made sense on this revolutionary device. The quick and easy answer would have been to do something that looked like a pdf file of the newspaper. Mark wasn’t having that. He wanted to create something that had the “feel” of a newspaper – legibility, browseabilty, a sense of hierarchy – with the tactile functionality of the iPad. The result is something that defies easy pigeon-holing. It is, much more than the browser version of the Guardian, a digital newspaper. The design is clean, modern, luminous, fresh and immensely readable. The navigation is intriguingly simple. Each section (national news, international, comment, sport etc) can be scanned in two swipes – up or across. So there’s never that feeling of losing your way that can mar some iPad conversions from print. Our first iPad app – the Eyewitness app – was launched on the day the first iPad was born in April 2010, and was immediately acclaimed by Steve Jobs in one word: “cool”. This Guardian iPad edition is launched to coincide with Apple’s Newsstand. One feature of this is that the Guardian will automatically download on to your device while you sleep. Simply grab your iPad as you leave the house and you will find the Guardian waiting for you. (Some of you are still lucky enough to have old-fashioned newsagents who do this. The Guardian iPad edition will not wake the dog as the paper snaps through the letter box. Nor will you have to stand for an eternity by your front door waiting for a creakingly slow download. No names, but you know who you are). The app will not please everyone. We’ve consciously set out, with this version, to deliver the Guardian newspaper edition, something that will work for some of our most loyal and passionate readers. It’s a reflective once-a-day Guardian, designed and edited for iPad. The Guardian is many other things. You can now watch, listen to and join in with the Guardian. You can literally follow it minute by minute around the clock as it reports, mirrors, analyses and gives context to the shifting patterns and rhythms of the world’s news. It’s Android when it wants to be, Kindle when it chooses. Other Guardian tablet apps will do different things. But I know many of you will love this particular incarnation of the Guardian – just one step on a long road that first saw the paper printed on one gigantic, folded sheet of newsprint in 1821. The pricing is extremely competitive – £9.99 a month. And, if you are a six- or seven-day subscriber for the paper, you can get it completely free. I hope you’ll get the free trial and that, for many, it becomes second nature to read the paper in this latest format. Do let us know what you make of it and how we can improve it … And happy reading. iPad The Guardian Apps Apple Guardian iPad edition Digital media Alan Rusbridger guardian.co.uk