Adobe announces magazine digital publishing platform for Apple iPad
Adobe on Tuesday announced its new digital viewer technology, aimed to help publishers convert their magazines to an interactive format viewable on portable devices like Apple's iPad.
The technology was first demonstrated with last week's introduction of the Wired magazine e-edition. Though the publication was originally intended to be released based on a version of Adobe's Flash, the software was completely rewritten in Objective-C for approval on Apple's App Store.
The iPad edition of Wired has found great success, with the $4.99 issue remaining at or near the top of the App Store sales charts since its debut.
"Adobe's work with Wired has resulted in a digital magazine format that creates an immersive experience, allowing a publication's unique content, look and feel and advertising to stand out in the digital realm," said David Burkett, vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions at Adobe. "We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It's safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you'll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication."
Utilizing the 9.7-inch touch panel of the iPad, the e-edition of Wired offers unique features such as video, slide shows, 360-degree rotatable images and more. The digital version was designed by the magazine's print team and employs multi-touch gestures, such as zooming.
"Our partnership with Adobe allowed us to re-imagine and build a print issue into an amazing digital magazine experience on the iPad," said Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director of Conde Nast. "Wired's visionary execution of Adobe technology expands the potential of this new medium for all Conde Nast magazines. Our work with Adobe is just the beginning. We expect to use this technology to deliver more of our publications over the coming months."
Adobe has also touted the advertising possibilities with its new digital viewer technology. It noted that the first iPad edition of Wired has allowed major corporations to incorporate interactive features in their ad campaigns. Adobe said the advertisements "encourage readers to interact with each brand."
Wired and Adobe had to rebuild their application from the ground up after it was revealed that Apple would not allow the use of intermediary tools to port software from another format, such as Flash, to the iPhone OS. The move was necessitated after Apple changed the iPhone developer agreement to ban third-party tools that would allow software to be ported from other formats, like Adobe Flash, to native iPhone OS software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said such tools would result in substandard applications on the Apple-controlled App Store.
Previously, Adobe had developed a digital publishing format dubbed AIR that was designed to be a cross-platform runtime environment that would allow content to be viewed on a number of devices, including those running the iPhone OS. AIR, or the Adobe Integrated Runtime, allowed for the development of standalone applications using Flash tools. But Apple's changes to its iPhone OS developer agreement forced Adobe to develop the alternative digital viewer technology, announced Tuesday.
The technology was first demonstrated with last week's introduction of the Wired magazine e-edition. Though the publication was originally intended to be released based on a version of Adobe's Flash, the software was completely rewritten in Objective-C for approval on Apple's App Store.
The iPad edition of Wired has found great success, with the $4.99 issue remaining at or near the top of the App Store sales charts since its debut.
"Adobe's work with Wired has resulted in a digital magazine format that creates an immersive experience, allowing a publication's unique content, look and feel and advertising to stand out in the digital realm," said David Burkett, vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions at Adobe. "We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It's safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you'll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication."
Utilizing the 9.7-inch touch panel of the iPad, the e-edition of Wired offers unique features such as video, slide shows, 360-degree rotatable images and more. The digital version was designed by the magazine's print team and employs multi-touch gestures, such as zooming.
"Our partnership with Adobe allowed us to re-imagine and build a print issue into an amazing digital magazine experience on the iPad," said Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director of Conde Nast. "Wired's visionary execution of Adobe technology expands the potential of this new medium for all Conde Nast magazines. Our work with Adobe is just the beginning. We expect to use this technology to deliver more of our publications over the coming months."
Adobe has also touted the advertising possibilities with its new digital viewer technology. It noted that the first iPad edition of Wired has allowed major corporations to incorporate interactive features in their ad campaigns. Adobe said the advertisements "encourage readers to interact with each brand."
Wired and Adobe had to rebuild their application from the ground up after it was revealed that Apple would not allow the use of intermediary tools to port software from another format, such as Flash, to the iPhone OS. The move was necessitated after Apple changed the iPhone developer agreement to ban third-party tools that would allow software to be ported from other formats, like Adobe Flash, to native iPhone OS software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said such tools would result in substandard applications on the Apple-controlled App Store.
Previously, Adobe had developed a digital publishing format dubbed AIR that was designed to be a cross-platform runtime environment that would allow content to be viewed on a number of devices, including those running the iPhone OS. AIR, or the Adobe Integrated Runtime, allowed for the development of standalone applications using Flash tools. But Apple's changes to its iPhone OS developer agreement forced Adobe to develop the alternative digital viewer technology, announced Tuesday.
Comments
Even Adobe can't ignore the impact the ipad, and the similar devices that will follow, will have on the way we receive information.
This is the beginning, of the end, of the Flash wars.
Even Adobe can't ignore the impact the ipad, and the similar devices that will follow, will have on the way we receive information.
Right... But if Adobe wanted to control publishing performance on the iPad this is how they'd do it, now they're able to demonstrate how Flash tablets would better than non-Flash tablets i.e. iPad.
Thanks to heir short sighted CEO, Adobe invested huge amount of money and effort into Flash, and they're not gonna let that all go without a fight.
You get a magazine that takes a long time to download onto you iPad, you also get a magazine which looks exactly like the slab of paper you pick up at the news stand which is filled with ads from car companies and others.
What you don't get are:
- Bookmarks.
- Search.
- Zoom.
- Intuitiveness. Somepages scroll vertically and some horizontally WTF!!
- Interactivity. The Mars demo is useless, it's just a movie without a visible timeline.
See, it can be done Adobe. Why all the silly Flash posturing and hullabaloo?
Proving how 'fluidity' can be facilitated when necessary!
What you don't get are:
- Intuitiveness. Somepages scroll vertically and some horizontally WTF!!
Horizontal scrolling is through the whole magazine, vertical scrolling is within articles? pretty intuitive if you ask me.
The problem is you don't get a sense of where you are within the magazine.
What you don't get are:
- Bookmarks.
- Search.
- Zoom.
- Intuitiveness. Somepages scroll vertically and some horizontally WTF!!
- Interactivity. The Mars demo is useless, it's just a movie without a visible timeline.
Hopefully this will all follow asap. Apple already demonstrated all was possible in HTML5. Now it's a matter of creating designer friendly tools to do all this. Again I repeat I'd love to see a designer program from Apple for all this.
Publishers who use these tools are at the mercy of Adobe to deliver better versions of it . . . just the kind of think Steve Jobs didn't want to happen.
What you don't get are:
- Bookmarks.
- Search.
- Zoom.
- Intuitiveness. Somepages scroll vertically and some horizontally WTF!!
- Interactivity. The Mars demo is useless, it's just a movie without a visible timeline.
I would say that for a first effort that it appears they did a good job. We don't know if they even consider this 1.0 quality work - I do expect that you will see more to come. I doubt they expect that they are done. Give it an issue or two and lets see what Apple has (if anything) up its sleeve in regards to a framework for this kind of thing. I think we should give them a break for now.
BTW: Although the article says it is rewritten in Objective-C I suspect that is not completely true. Objective-C is a superset of the C language and it would take only a small amount of actual Objective-C code and a lot of previously written C an C++ code to meet the requirements of the agreement. As long as they can compile it using the Xcode tools then it is cool.
What you don't get are:
- Bookmarks.
- Search.
- Zoom.
- Intuitiveness. Somepages scroll vertically and some horizontally WTF!!
- Interactivity. The Mars demo is useless, it's just a movie without a visible timeline.
Did you read the Editor's Note?
And the Mars demo. Just move your finger slowly across the screen and the timeline visibly presented.
As a previous publisher, the app is extremely well done and with a little more time, it will get even better. It may not be for everyone, but neither is the Bible.
Horizontal scrolling is through the whole magazine, vertical scrolling is within articles? pretty intuitive if you ask me.
The problem is you don't get a sense of where you are within the magazine.
The scroll bar at the bottom pops up when you flip horizontally, showing your relative position.
There needs to be a reset button, as when you finish your article, you are at the last(bottom) page before swiping right. If you give it to someone else to read, they have to scroll the articles to the top.
You get a magazine that takes a long time to download onto you iPad, you also get a magazine which looks exactly like the slab of paper you pick up at the news stand which is filled with ads from car companies and others.
Its even worse than that! It consists of 2 images (1 portrait, 1 landscape) for each page.
Most of these pages may look good in print, but the text presentation is FUgly on the iPad and, mostly, unreadable.
It has a confusing, non-intuitive, non-standard UI for page turning and navigation.
The presenter/player ignores the capabilities of the device-- you can't zoom/pan, copy paste, bookmark, annotate...
I think that Adobe is tricking us with a Flash in Sheep's clothing!
For a complete analysis, see:
http://interfacelab.com/is-this-real...st-use-html-5/
.
Horizontal scrolling is through the whole magazine, vertical scrolling is within articles… pretty intuitive if you ask me.
The problem is you don't get a sense of where you are within the magazine.
Press the top right corner to see the thumbnails and a down arrow tells you where you are in the magazine. Love the concept.
Another example of poor development tools. This quick hack by Adobe results in bloated files and poor or non existent use of interactive features.
Publishers who use these tools are at the mercy of Adobe to deliver better versions of it . . . just the kind of think Steve Jobs didn't want to happen.
What Steve did not want was a development tool that used some third party runtime that gave them the ability to ignore the Cocoa Touch and Cocoa frameworks that they have control over. I suspect performance and size was also a goal but the main thing was to make sure that everyone was using the frameworks so that when the OS changes the apps can magically change with it instead of ignoring new features.
This is similar to the reason that they don't want us developers using private API (i.e., non-public API's) since they can and do change and an OS release can break things. I Apple is the only one using these "private calls" then they can mitigate the damage since they control they code that uses it also.
Horizontal scrolling is through the whole magazine, vertical scrolling is within articles… pretty intuitive if you ask me.
The problem is you don't get a sense of where you are within the magazine.
imo there should be some kind of visual effect showing this particular page can scroll vertically. Like most ipad apps, interface is confusing. Also, sometimes page scrolling blocks for no apparent reasons.
The tool still need lots of work by it shows what could be done.
and about spaces used, newsflash: video and pics take spaces....