Secrets & Happiness of Digital Publishing

Announcement: I am now part of the Experience Design Team for Digital Publishing Suite at Adobe

First of all, I want to apologize to my loyal readers for the recent slowness in writing for this blog. Second, I want to thank you for your tremendous feedback, support and commenting over the past two years of the existence of this blog.

It all started out as a a blog to follow along the research I made for my bachelor thesis while graduating from Graphic Design School. At the end of that, I created the DONE magazine wich reached quite good attention and received the Adobe MAX 2011 Award — thanks to all your votes! I am very grateful for everything that came out of this blog and the DONE app.

This summer, Adobe contacted me and we started working on things around Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite. Recently, I joined the Experience Design (XD) Team that works on all tools and workflows involved while creating, publishing and viewing editorial content on mobile devices. In that team, we create experiences for Designers, Authors and Viewers in a exciting environment that’s always in motion.

We are working hard to get you, the designers and creators, great tools to create your content and give the readers the best user experience while they view your carefully edited and designed content.

Don’t be worried, I will continue this blog. I will keep you updated on developments in the industry, the environment and on Adobe’s Tools. I will express my personal opinion and will continue to give you my thoughts on Digital Publishing (and by that join colleagues like John Nack, Andre Jay Meissner and Mike Chambers, who also run their personal blogs while being an Adobe Employee).

Also, this blog is an excellent way for myself in staying in touch with you, the community and with what happens out there.

Thank you again for all your feedback and being loyal readers to this blog. It’s fun. And it’s all just the beginning.

—Johannes

DPS release22

Adobe released DPS version 22 on August 8 (sorry for the delayed post).

The Version 22 of DPS brings a few changes in the background, for enterprise customers and in the viewer library. Read full release notes here.

As always, check the status of the tools at caniupdateadobedps.com

Library Filters

If a folio is made in version 23 or later, you can now define a Filter Tag (only one!) in the online producer tools, wich will make the filters appear in the content viewer and your custom library app:

Custom HTML Library

Enterprise Customers can now build a custom HTML library (in addition to a custom HTML store). Documentation is available on the DPS DevNet.

Auto Hide Scrollbars

With this feature enabled in your viewer you finally get really fullscreen folios. Before that, a 6 pixel black bar was cropped from your layout on the right edge. Now the scrollbar only appears during scrolling and is semi-transparent.

More new features are described in the Help Article.

View high resolution

The New Yorker is now on iPad and iPhone

It’s not the first DPS magazine appearing on the iPhone, but it is the biggest title and one of the best DPS magazines out there.

View in Original size

The team at Condé Nast around Scott Dadich made a great job transferring the longform experience to that smaller screen. NewYorker’s content adapts greatly to the new formfactor, and has all the features and more:

They introduced persistent objects that don’t move on screen and a drawer that appears on the bottom of the screen that you can tap-open and share your article from.

This is possible because The New Yorker is using HTML for most it’s articles, instead of creating them in InDesign originally.

They even made a great introduction video featuring Lena Dunham and Alex Kaporvsky. This short clip was written by Dunham and Produced by Dadich.

If you want to hear the New Yorker story in the corporate marketing voice of Adobe, watch this video.

View high resolution

great kickstarter campaign by Ajar Productions to build a plugin for InDesign to convert your layouts to HTML5 web apps.

If you’re like many designers we know, you’re able to produce some fantastic designs using InDesign. More and more, clients are asking for digital projects like HTML5 websites and mobile apps. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way to translate your designs into web and mobile experiences. Your contribution to this project will help us change that. Below are some reasons why we think you might be interested in contributing.

(via InDesign to HTML5 by Ajar Productions — Kickstarter)

A New Kind of Catalog: The 2013 IKEA Catalog App Preview (von IKEAUSA)

via designWeek

Read more about McCann’s IKEA engagement

Adobe DPS v21: Versioning and direct Previews

Adobe just released version 21 of the Digital Publishing Suite for everybody using InDesign to create digital magazines. As always the Folio Builder Panel is mandatory to update, you can keep your producer tools at the version you like.

If your Folio Builder Panel is telling you to update, the link inside the message is wrong (Anselm reported this morning). Make sure to grab the latest version after log in at digitalpublishing.acrobat.com.

The most important change in this release is the ability to set the folio version upon creation of the folio. With this you can create a folio that is compatible with a viewer down to v20 although you have the recent producer tools installed.

Since the Adobe Viewer v21 is currently in review at Apple, you can create a folio in v20 to be compatible with the current available viewer or if your live app you are creating for is made with an earlier version of the tools. You cannot create a folio for an earlier version than 20.

Other changes in v21:

Preview the current layout on the iPad or iPhone

For iOS users, it is possible to send just the current article to the iPad or iPhone for preview. Previously, you could only preview whole folios. This makes it a lot faster to preview your content on the device. The article does not require to be included in a folio.

Improved Social Sharing

If you create your folio in PNG format, the Web Viewer is handling interactive overlays a lot better now. If you create a PDF folio, the viewer in the desktop browser will still show PDFs of your article.

Auto-View during Download

When you buy or download a new folio, the viewer immediatly opens it when content is available.

Subtle texture in browse mode

Any viewer from v21 will show a subtle texture in the background of browse mode.

A lot of other improvements are on the backend side this time, so there are not many improvements for authoring in InDesign except of the versioning feature.

—Johannes

Using Adobe Edge for Animations (better then ever!)

Adobe released Adobe Edge in preview 6 a few weeks ago, nearly closely to version 20 of Adobe DPS. They now work better together: When you create an animation in Adobe Edge and Publish for DPS, your animation will start instantly and faster as before (there was a two-second-delay in your animation).

For a short and complete tutorial on how to prepare your Edge Animation for use in Adobe DPS, check Anselm Hannemann’s blog post “Creating Interactive Overlays with Adobe Edge”.

—Johannes

Digital Publishing Summit (Live Transcript) →

Adobe held a digital publishing summit in New York last week, where they officially talked about the release 20 of DPS and brought a few publishers on stage like Fast Company, National Geographic and Condé Nast, wich already use the latest technology for their iPad publication design.

You can read the full transcript of the summit by following the link or read a breakdown in the Adobe Digital Publishing blog.

You have already heard about release 20 on this blog, so I will share the things that are new to this event:

— Selected fonts from the Adobe Type Library are licenced to be embedded in digital publication, including PDF and HTML format.
— Adobe Edge now includes integrated support for DPS (I will write about this later)
— The New Yorker is likely to be the first publication to be available on the iPhone

—Johannes

Why Publishers Don't Like Apps →

After all the “hay!” about Digital Publishing for Apps during the past months, I want to give a bit of salt and pepper to you:

The future of media on mobile devices isn’t with applications but with the Web.#

Read this very intense article about the course of Technology Review, and why they will do the same like the Financial Times: dropping their apps in the App Store and going all the way of HTML5.

—Johannes

Adobe releases v20 of DPS

On May 2nd, Adobe pushed a new update of the DPS, now in version 20. Here are the important infos and updates (all details here):

iPhone support

You can now build apps for the iPhone as well (create folios in 480x320 or 960x640), they appear in the content viewer for iPhone and in your app. You can only create multi folio apps for the iPhone for now. Therefore, Single Edition does not yet work with the iPhone.

The iPhone viewer does look and work a bit different. While you scrub with the slider at the bottom, the iPhone is going into the browsing mode automatically.

The app you build is an universal app that works both on the iPad and iPhone. Or you can build them individually.

Web Viewer 

Folios that are enabled for social sharing via facebook or twitter (new!) or email (new!) or copy link (new!) can now be viewed in the browser, maintaining interactivity. You can protect articles that are not accessible in the browser. View a Demo here.

InDesign CS6 compatibility

When InDesign CS6 is available, the v20 tools will be compatible and you wil be able to use CS6 with these tools.

Improved Folio Producer

The design and workflow of the Folio Producer at digitalpublishing.acrobat.com is improved. Publishing a folio to the distribution service now runs in the background. An article has now the “Hide from TOC” setting, making it disappear from the Table of Contents without setting it as an Ad.

Improved Folio Builder Panel

The folio builder panel now shows the size of the folio. Small improvements when creating articles and folios, but still now out-of-date indicators, update-all or something else that would improve the usability.

Other improvements

Resizeable Content Viewer (if your screen is smaller than the folio you are watching), Preview on Device does no longer require you to use Phonedisk and smooth scrolling articles in PDF will be kept as PDF when they are no longer than two pages (smooth scrolling articles longer than that will automatically be converted to static PNG/JPG).

Can I update Adobe DPS?

If you are a pro or enterprise customer, you can build your own content viewer for iPad or iPhone and test your v20 folios.

Everybody else should wait for the generic Adobe Content Viewer to be approved by Apple. Neil Enns from Adobe shares the status of the approval here.

You can always keep an eye (or RSS reader) on this site: caniupdateadobedps.com

—Johannes