Adobe announces magazine digital publishing platform for Apple iPad - Page 2

Two answers:

1) You may not be at a place where you can practically connect to the internet (location, speed, cost).

2) A custom self-contained magazine could provide a better UX... Unfortunately, with Wired Magazine, the web (and browser) provides a better UX.

E.g., I have 70-year-old eyes and have difficulty reading Wired on the iPad. On the web I, can magnify the text as suits me!

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How about "Flesh"

or


pseudo-Flash in the Pad.

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... And, we have a winner!

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If I was a shareholder of Adobe I would thank apple every day for starting this flash war. Adobe really kicked things into high gear, both in terms of flash development with 10.1 and with these new tools, which were rewritten in C in record time. Adobe now has the underdog status, which should help them work harder to build things outside of flash, as well as make sure that flash gets better for those who must use it (like Firefox Users).

I've read that article and I'm not sure the author knows how a magazine is produced -- in the case of Wired, with InDesign. Only a handful of art directors know much about HTML5 or Objective-C, or even Flash, for that matter. Most grew up with Quark, then moved on to InDesign.

What print publishers are looking for is a way to port over their print magazines to the iPad rather than build them from scratch. The economics of building a new app every month just doesn't work for them -- especially when a page of advertising in a print magazine brings in tens of thousands of dollars (meaning all those paid apps are the equivalent of about one page of advertising, that's all).

The Volkswagen Das magazine app, created by Rhbm, is an example of a stand-alone iPad app with animation, video, the works. But that app is produced once and that's it. Condé Nast needs a publishing platform that will allow them to produce an app a month without employing tons of developers.

[QUOTE=Onhka;1642879][1] Totally disagree. Not any different that paper mags or books. Great use of type. They know their typography.



I have a very powerful device, and a (powerful?) custom app displaying custom reading content. The type is too small, and too close together for me to read. There is nothing I can do about it!

For me, and others with declining eyesight, it is game, set and match!

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It's nice to see Adobe deciding to produce something that works, rather than trying to force Apple into allowing Flash. But the Wired issue points to something Apple needs to fix: the ability to add fonts to Apps. There are some workarounds (including page images that blow up a magazine to 500 MB), but I believe they all require the iPad to be hooked up to the Web. Publishers can use whatever technology gets the job done, but they're not going to want to accept limitations on how they graphically present their message.

I'm writing a novel and experimented with making an ePub (via InDesign and Stanza). Embedding my fonts didn't work (anyone know how to do that so it shows up in a Mac ePub reader?). The final ePub looked dreadful compared to my PDF.

Gimme fonts!

Exactly most print designers can't program. But converting the print publication to another static version for iPad doesn't offer any of that interactivity that is so desirable. There is no magic button that will add interactivity to an inDesign project. There will be developers in the middle converting it to iPad and including all the things that Flash-like applications have. If the original document is in inDesign, then it is pretty simple to copy and paste from there to other CS5 applications to create the animations and interactivity. I would not be surprised at all if Flash isn't going to be part of the process. The converter is the key. That is what makes it a traditional C project and within the rules set forth by Apple.

You can override the css with an external font but it only works if the font is on the reader device.

if it's as buggy as flash, it's dead before it even hits the shelves.

adobe should clean house and get rid of anyone who's not on board and completely redo flashif it's that important to them.

also, i'm wondering about the possibility of filing a class action lawsuit against adobe based on the fact that when i produce a flash movie and goes to testing (multiple platforms), it crashes machines.

That's all true -- which is why the most interesting iPad magazines may come from new publishers who develop specifically for tablets, the same way website designers are web first. I think we will see more and more of these types of magazines in the months ahead. (As an aside, Letter to Jane is a web-only magazine that was brought over to the iPad, but the guy who put it out admits he is no programmer so the iPad version is pretty minimal).

Most publishers are very comfortable with Adobe and completely at a loss when it comes to app development. If I were a publisher starting a new company today (which I'd like to do) I'd start with the developers and add in traditional art directors, instead of doing it the other way around.

The problem is that the application size does not match the function of the device. As someone else said, they used their print tools to try and make something that the web tools would be more suitable for. 500MB is just simply too big for a device like the iPad. Quite frankly, it is too big for my laptop as well; they are over-valuing the quality of their pictures and under-valuing my bandwidth. It simply isn't sustainable.

Been there done that. Art comes first, sorry. The process does not run in reverse. The director does not take orders from the cameraman.

At least with Adobe's ePub reader, the fact that I created the ePub from my own InDesign file (using local fonts and double-checking the XML files to ensure they were properly listing the font) didn't mattermy fonts defaulted to "standard" fonts. But that might have been my inexperience leading to some kind of error.*

For the iPhone/iPad, since you can't add fonts, designers are hamstrung to the installed font base. Ick. P22's Civilite was exactly what I wanted for chapter titles. I hope to publish via a large publishing house, but I'd love to be able to make an ePub for my friends formatted exactly the way I'd want the book published. I guess they'll all get PDFs.

*Does ePub support OpenType fonts? That might have been the problem. It looks like I'm going to have to put some effort into learning the best way to make an ePub.

yes otf works, but you have to use override css and the font has to be on the device so the short answer is forget it. The reason the spec is designed that way is so each device has control over the display. Some devices have color some not. Some have small screens others not. ePub is about the words and pictures not the layout.

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the open source utility called Calibre? It is a conversion utiility for moving .pdf files into ePub format. I've had SOME success with it thus far, but the docs I'm converting are fairly basic. As time allows I want to expand my experiments to include much more complex .pdf docs to see what the limits are. As it is - I have a series of long out-of-print manuals and reference works that have transitioned successfully using Calibre.

Not true, some are vertical others are horizantal. They used a blue ribbon line to indicate the direction of the article...
Intuitiveness -FAIL-

How do we know if the Flash version would not have been large, too. I think what takes up so much space are all of the photos and movies included. With these interactive magazines, instead of just one photo, there can be 15 in the same space, stacked one on top of the other, or displayed as a photo album. This is what makes these magazines different from the print version.

This could be a print designer's salvation. We have been dying here for the past 10 years. Now, there is at least hope!

Ah! But you may be wrong, my friend! InDesign CS 5 has many interactive features built in. We can add mini slide shows by stacking photos on top of one another and then creating right and left buttons to show one at a time. We can add movies. Yes! We can!

Yup - this is just the beginning. A year or two from now the landscape will be very different. I predict a number of new tools out there for converting paper published content to apps, and the creation of rich HTML 5 content. A smart CMS app that can output to a range of modern platforms would probably sell quite well. Nothing like a completely new yet hugely successful platform to get things going!

I have the actual app, and the timeline is not intuitive, actually it's downright amateurish. Having said that, I have high expectations for the next issue. Hopefully the next issue would be considerable less than 500MB in size.

Yea ID5 is surprisingly awesome!

Great news for designers.

Finally, Adobe is starting to think straight.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article regarding how Digital Magazine Publishing and HTML5 could be a great opportunity for Adobe. I also talked about how they could establish a standard grammar for digital magazine navigation (this could also be customizable, though). Full Article here.

Though I don't think they're supporting HTML5 the way I'd find best (which would be as the structure of a digital magazine issue, supported by javascript and CSS3), I think they're starting to evaluate new ways past the Flash-Flash-Flash thinking (although this new platform also allows Flash technology).

The Size of the "Wired magazine for iPad" app is not good indeed.
HTML5 would be a better fit for it.

All in good time, my young Jedi.

So do I and I disagree that it is downright amateurish. I also have high expectations as time goes on.

The more that I get into it, I don't think that it is possible to get the app much lower in size. There is a lot of high quality graphic images and video here and one would expect it to have especially for the price. Not that I question the price, which I don't. I am certain that like all good mags, subscriptions will drive the price down.

FYI. Just off the wire:

Adobe Unveils Digital Viewer Technology for Magazines
For immediate release
Revolutionary WIRED Reader Application Delivered Through New Adobe Digital Publishing Technologies
SAN JOSE, Calif., — June 1, 2010 http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pres...talViewer.html

Indeed but that is a transitional document not the send to the printer CMYK version. As I said earlier, there will be interactive developers who take the print document as a starting point and make it interactive.

Excellent point!

I thought Apple has some sort of a limit about the size of each App?

Joomla, a CMS is about 1-3MB, compressed, A template company has added scripts and sample content that bloated around 10MB, compressed that becomes 30MB uncompressed. No Flash scripting and presentation used in the videos and banners, and other slideshows. And, it can be very slow if you do not have the fastest computer and connection.

Assuming the 500MB is correct, that is . If it is monthly, a year subscription of Wired would be 6000MB=6GB. So, if you did decide to subscribe to 10 newspapers/magazines, you would literally fillup the high end iPad storage at 64GB at the exclusion of almost everything else.

Unless SSDs become cheaper, 16GB iPads would not be the way to "consume" magazine content in the iPad.

I have perhaps more than a thousand bookmarked sites (folders within folders), view possibly a few dozen of them everyday, and perhaps hundred or so each month Ialthough the others more infrequently).


And here you are suggesting that hundreds of thousands of publishers potentially adopting the same strategy as Wired for their magazine for the iPad?

As others pointed out already, the content for mobile computing deveices must be developed so as not to simply replicate the strategy used for those viewed throught the internet or the browser.

Sure the user can remove the old copies to avoid the storage nightmare illustrated above. However, if iTunes becomes the archival for these bloats or be kept in cloud computing, it will not be very cheap for Apple, just like You Tube is very costly for Google, in terms of bandwidth usage, And we are not talking 500MB You tube videos. This is especially true if the ads in the magazine are not even owned by Apple, like Google more than likely controls all the ads in the You Tube.

I hope Apple realizes this before they create their own nightmare if hundreds of thousands of developers do follow Wired's approach,

I am not sure how much bandwidth usage would be used by the consumer shuttling those 500MB contents to their iPads from their iTunes account, if they keep on deleting them.


A decent biology or medical book would become a tank or more an aircraft carrier the size of Nimitz, if they are to use 10MB static images, let alone video images.

Do not confuse printed glossy magazine images with sreen viewed images.

Unless, we are dealing with historical images that are archived, no self-respecting webdeveloper/webmaster will use 10meg (is that the same as MB?) for internet presentation. There is such thing as screen-optimized images where a 5MB image can be reduced to 100-500KB, without the viewer of 10-24" screen seeing any grains,


Also, in terms of bandthwidth usage, a concern for both Apple and the user, imagine how much bandwidth you are using if you keep on downloading 10MB advertisements and images. Your battery would love you to death.

CGC

The funny thing is that the Popular Science magazine app weighs in at 60MB and was done entirely in objective-c.

60MB native or 500MB Adobe.....hmmmm

(I think Steve might be onto something)

One of the best looking sites of the web is Apple's and if the truth be known, it was and is not created by a 'web' designer.

And the last thing that the editor and art director wants is to take the likes of WIRED and web it.

Well, nevertheless it's a start.
Now, get back to work, Adobe.

And make something like what's described here.

Yes! I know nothing about the publishing business, but as a consumer, I would not want to consume content that was technically correct but unattractive... My late wife was smart, competent, funny, great personality and a true pleasure to be with.... But what gave me the opportunity to discover those attributes was her looks!

The challenge, as I see it, is how do you take static content and enhance it to provide a better UX.

The early web, with hypertext (links, and later searches, etc.) made text easier to find and consume, but somewhat less attractive. Early, additions of animated GIFs, images, Flash and pop-ups (even banner ads) were an attempt to make the content more attractive.

I am all for that! Within limits!

Where it all went wrong, IMO, is when the content took a secondary roll to gratuitous Sizzle and Flash!

Devices like the iPad provide the opportunity for content publishers to reverse that trend.

At the very least, they can recapture the personal bond between the user and the published page.

Done right, they can provide the vehicle to travel with the user as he immerses himself in a totally new personal experience like no other.

I hope they succeed!

Some things need be left to the imagination and discovery of the user!

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Apple raised the 10MB limit it to 20MBs over 3G in February. Otherwise, it is unlimited via Wi-Fi. My iPhone TomTom App is 1.55 GB


Why the hell would anybody even want to store copies of all their magazines on their iPad?

And you could:
-- cut the size by 50% at least (eliminate duplicate pngs of landscape and Portrait pages)
-- cut the size even further by eliminating text from the remaining pngs,
-- allow resize and reflow of text for the visually challenged
-- allow bookmarks and annotation (if not copy/paste)
-- provide a more platform consistent UX.

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The iPad's resolution is 1024x768 pixels, a JPG file at max quality tops below 800KB. I expect the whole magazine to add up to a maximum of 150MB. The video footage should be streamable. It is necessary that a magazine of any sort be portable in size so it can be downloaded over a 3G network; otherwise, it would be easier to just visit the site.

I do!

1) They have 2 images for each page-- 1 for landscape, 1 for portrait. Kill 1 and re-flow the other
2) Each page image (above) contains a picture of static text (as if they took a picture of a printed magazine page). Crop the images to contain no text and provide, the text as text.

You said you read the article I referenced in an earlier post. Apparently you didn't, or you didn't understand it.

http://interfacelab.com/is-this-real...st-use-html-5/

This Wired app is just a bloated, clumsy, non-intuitive poor-man's slide-show with no ability to do basic customization to enhance the UX-- i.e. zoom the text so it is readable... Fuck the Font selection!

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That's a good article... and good advice... stranger!

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Not at 500 MB they won't. Wow, 500MB, thats bad. Just give me a PDF of the magazines with links and perhaps some basic, generic, embedded content. Don't need all the bells and whistles.