The 'experts' at Wired didn't anticipate that iPad wouldn't use flash?!? Really?? Three years of flash-free iPhone and still no clue? I don't buy it. Is it possible that CNaste thought they could 'muscle' it onto the iPad? That they thought iPad would be more dependent on their content than they would depend on iPad? Ironic, funny, sad... I'm not sure what the proper reaction should be. ...
It would seem that someone at Adobe seriously misled the 'experts' at Wired, who do seem pretty clueless in their own right.
I don't get this.. is this just all about Adobe not having to admit Apple was right?
I mean what's wrong with adobe just saying, "hey Flash is a fantastic product, but it looks like apple is right in saying it just isn't the right fit for mobile devices." It's not like they would be admitting they built a crap product.. Flash is a great product, it was simply NEVER meant for a mobile platform because the mobile platform was non-existant when flash was created!!
From what I read in his letter that's what steve jobs was trying to say too. Flash was a great product for what it was created for, but it didn't transition well to iPhone OS because it wasn't built for a mobile platform. They gave them 3 years to come up with something new, but they didn't so apple is now moving on.
Adobe seems to be trying as hard as they possibly can to turn this into an attack on Flash to avoid doing something that, as a companies who creates new technology, they CAN do well, which is create good products!! It just seems like such a missed oportunity on their part. I gaurentee if they create something new that oporates well on mobile OS, apple would allow it on their products.
Wow, I never realized how clueless and baised Daniel Eran Dilger was, until reading this article.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Let's pretend that it would be smaller to embed the many fonts that are in each magazine, with the magazine. (Ignore that HTML5 doesn't have that capability). Figure 20-40 fonts per magazine, and you have to deal with dozens of publishers and try to get highly expensive licenses for inclusion?
How much space do you think that takes. And probably 50% of every page is ads or photos, or something interactive, that would have to be images anyways.
And can you imagine trying to re-render each page on a baby ARM processor? I'm sure you think 30 seconds to render each page would be an improvement in interactivity, but not sure the customers would think so.
Seems like anyone with an engineering background or IQ in the triple digits would quickly realize that your choices are (a) image driven representation like Zinio, Adobe and the other magazines use (b) layout driven interface like PDF, with many embedded fonts. You can get some space savings for the latter, with huge performance and interaction penalties. (And 20 times the development and production time, which means magazines and Adobe would have to charge more to break-even, and it would mean less content).
So sounds like for now, they made the better choice. I get my content sooner, cheaper and with better interactivity. Maybe that's why the other magazine engines work that way as well?
... So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on. ...
Sounds like you (and Wired and Adobe) are still stuck in the old paradigm. That explains why it's incomprehensible to you.
I can't help but wonder given the deep analysis and inside information presented here what sources that AppleInsider used to glean all of this?
The sad problem with AppleInsider and Daniel Eran Dilger is that you have lost ALL objectivity. Apple has told you Adobe is bad, so Adobe is bad. Apple told you Flash was bad, it's the worst thing ever. When Apple decides that HTML5 no longer suits its business purpose, will you slam that as well then?
Please remember that Mr. Dilger is NOT a journalist. He's a blogger with deep-Apple connections and a bunch of ill-informed opinions that he spouts down as truth. If you consider, he's not too unlike Rush Limbaugh. Makes for great entertainment but not for truthful reporting.
Please, Mr. Dilger. Can you at least fact-check your "journalism" or minimally list your sources?
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
Magazine publisher Condé Nast was so sold on Adobe's Flash platform that the company didn't even anticipate Apple's iPad wouldn't support Flash. As a result, it had to resort to a clumsy workaround from Adobe to make it into the iTunes App Store.
Condé Nast designs its paper magazines using Adobe's InDesign, so it seemed like a natural progression to output its InDesign page layout into Adobe's companion Flash Professional app to generate Flash content that could be viewed on mobile devices.
That was the company's digital strategy before Apple launched iPad, and was reiterated at the going plan right up to and even after Apple outlined that the iPhone App Store wouldn't support code-generated apps exported by Flash Professional.
A failed Flash strategy
The other problem: there really aren't any popular mobile devices that display Flash. Adobe is just now getting around to releasing its beta version of a Flash Player for smartphones, but it currently only works on Android, a platform that doesn't sell lots of paid content, and only on a small subset of the newest Android devices that are fast enough to run it.
Most tablets, like HP's Slate PC that was discontinued in the wake of iPad, are designed to use Windows 7, but while that operating system supports Flash as a web browser plugin just like desktop PCs, it hasn't found any interest among users when installed on tablet devices.
The only successful tablet is currently the iPad, which like the iPhone and iPod touch has never supported Flash because Adobe has never released a suitable Flash Player for the iPhone OS in its last three years of its existence.
Too late
At this point, Apple has hitched its wagons to HTML5 for dynamic content, and won't be supporting Flash until Adobe's platform develops into something that works really well on mobiles and customers start demanding Flash playback as a feature.
Unfortunately for Adobe, that's unlikely to ever happen because the iPhone OS now makes up such a large and conspicuous chunk of the smartphone, media player, and tablet markets that content developers are now rethinking how to publish their content in a format that can be viewed by Apple's influential users.
Web developers sensitive to Apple's affluent demographic have already begun removing Flash from their websites, from Carnival cruise lines to the Virgin America airline. But rather than anticipating this trend, Condé Nast forged ahead with Adobe on a Flash-centric publishing partnership, only to find out, too late, that Adobe's backup plan for automatically generating native iPhone apps from Flash Professional wouldn't meet with Apple's App Store approval.
In order for Condé Nast to ship an iPhone OS app for iPad, it would need to build the app using Apple's development tools, not Adobe's middleware solution.
Adobe's Plan C: Objective-C
Rather than design original content for iPad or simply create a custom, standards-based website in HTML, Adobe sold Condé Nast on distributing its existing InDesign pages as large graphic files presented using a standard iPhone OS viewer app built according to Apple's rules.
The result was that Adobe could claim relevance as an essential link in the publisher chain, and Condé Nast could sell its magazine published as an iPad app without too much extra work. The downside is that there's nothing really interesting or novel about the iPad version of Wired, apart from the fact that Adobe's workaround results in a huge "app" that weighs in at around 500MB.
Adobe's solution to publishing digital content on iPad is a lot like its strategy for delivering Creative Suite content on the web: cut up Photoshop and InDesign designer's print pages into large image files fit into an HTML table. That creates a website that looks exactly like the existing print work, but which doesn't really look (or act) like a website.
"Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate"
A designer who examined the Wired app reports "each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by 'a bunch of images' I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB."
His investigation, published on the InterfaceLab blog, notes that "each full page is a giant image ? there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode. Yes, I?m laughing on the inside too. There is no text or HTML, just one gigantic image. The 'interactive' pieces where you can slide your finger to animate it are just a series of JPG files. When you press play on the audio file and see the progress meter animate? A series of PNG files.
"Something is wrong with this picture. Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate," he added.
The Adobe viewer app, hailed in the company's press release as "a new digital viewer technology that enables print publishers to bring stunning digital versions of their magazines to life," is actually not too far removed from a CD-ROM from the 90's says the author of the report.
Adobe still pleased with its work
David Burkett, Adobe's vice president and general manager for Creative Solutions, wrote in the company's press release that "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.
"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."
Adobe touts its app as "new digital viewer technology" which enables "readers to experience video content, slide-shows, 360 degree images and rotate content in vertical and horizontal modes," and notes that the Wired Reader "goes several steps further, taking advantage of the tablet form factor and enabling readers to explore magazine content using touch gestures, including a zoomed-out browse mode, to see the content of the issue at a glance. Readers are able to experience the design fidelity of a print magazine, with the dynamic interactivity of digital media."
What the Wired Reader does not do is present content that isn't already available on the Wired website. Or allow users to change font sizes or typefaces, the way Apple's iBooks app does for digital books (or as standard web browsers do). There's also no really interesting interactivity features, nor even the ability to download newer or archived issues of the magazine as they become available via Apple's in-app purchasing feature.
It's solely a digital version of the print artwork, which is precisely what Flash was intended to deliver for print publishers on the web: a way to generate content to sell digitally without doing much work or taking on any risk in creating something new.
Condé Nast's other publications, GQ and Vanity Fair, are similarly expected to use the same model for bringing their magazines to iPad. One former employee of Condé Nast noted that this may be the case, not just out of laziness, but also because the publisher wants to be able to count digital editions as part of its distribution numbers mixed in with physical magazine sales for advertising purposes. Making them essentially the same thing helps in that regard.
Magazines in HTML5
Not all publishers are sold on cranking out the most elementary electronic versions of their paper magazines. At Google's I/O conference, Sports Illustrated demonstrated an HTML5 version of its work that marks up sections and articles using new structure elements and adds drag and drop navigation features (for creating bookmarks of embedded media such as video clips), while also taking advantage of Web Workers and other features of HTML5 that makes the content significant faster than rendering objects in plain JavaScript or Flash.
The digital publication, "in beta," also presented embedded animated visualizations based on a live survey, integration with Google Maps, and even rich, immersive advertising similar to the iAd program Apple demonstrated for iPhone OS 4 (as shown in the video below).
Despite a variety of interesting features in the demo, it did not appear to include any special ability to increase font sizes or change font face outside of the browser itself. That makes it somewhat questionable why magazine publishers don't simply sell their periodicals as iBooks on Apple's platform, which already supports rich content in an open format that publishers can also sell in competing digital venues.
I just wish all the criticism about not being able to change font size was applied by the author to its own blog RDM. It is a pain to use that site on the iPhone.
Wow, I never realized how clueless and baised Daniel Eran Dilger was, until reading this article.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Yeah Wired has such subtle design with its orange on black text and interwoven fonts ad absurdum. But seriously, the problem design wonks have with the web is their own problem. Your customers aren't interested in your design skills, they're looking for content. If that weren't the case, you'd be selling your fancy designs, and the web would be failing to find readers.
What people like you need to grasp is that people go to content sources for information, not to marvel at your design skills. So stop firing your writing staff and fire some of the queens sitting in front of Photoshop and InDesign and just deliver high quality content, like society enjoyed before the brief period of the 90s when real content was overshadowed by egregious design.
Also, get informed about HTML. Sure, it's not intended to be a pixel perfect representation of print content, but that's why its useful, accessible (ever heard of disabilities or old eyes?) flexible and does not need some massive processor to render as you so idiotically suggested.
Forget html5, who cares (just because Jobs say so?!?)
Still NO 64 bit support for creative suite (only PS) still no 64 bit flash plugin and so on... x64 is more important than some html standard that won't even be around long (if it catches on at all).
sadly, you are mistaken about html5. i agree with you about adobe and 64-bit. should have happened with cs4, probably won't happen until cs8 or 9.
my beef with flash is that adobe's own product, flash plug-in, doesn't even work?consistently? using their own product to produce content.
Sounds like you (and Wired and Adobe) are still stuck in the old paradigm. That explains why it's incomprehensible to you.
Exactly. We had a choice of a highly refined scripting engine that could have done the layout quicker/easier (with more compression). It was called Flash/Air, but Apple rejected it. So it sounds like Adobe responded with the next choice which was a native ObjectiveC application.
The choice was:
a) spend a fortune in a new layout engine that could handle magazines demands, but it would waste months and be unusably slow and not save what, 20% more space?
b) put up with a sub-par experience, which means magazines would just opt out completely. (They still feel their brand is 1/2 their visual representation).
c) Use image driven engine because it is faster interaction.
Seems like option C was the correct one. Which is probably why Zinio and other magazine engines made the same choice (but the article omitted that key piece of information).
I don't doubt that Adobe can and should improve the compression and encoding. But I'm glad I can read a magazine today (bloat and all), versus just drinking cool-aid on how great it will be in 5 years when HTML5 and the iPad4 hardware is really ready to do this (and reading nothing but Steve Jobs blogs in the interim).
I can't help but wonder given the deep analysis and inside information presented here what sources that AppleInsider used to glean all of this?
The sad problem with AppleInsider and Daniel Eran Dilger is that you have lost ALL objectivity. Apple has told you Adobe is bad, so Adobe is bad. Apple told you Flash was bad, it's the worst thing ever. When Apple decides that HTML5 no longer suits its business purpose, will you slam that as well then?
Please remember that Mr. Dilger is NOT a journalist. He's a blogger with deep-Apple connections and a bunch of ill-informed opinions that he spouts down as truth. If you consider, he's not too unlike Rush Limbaugh. Makes for great entertainment but not for truthful reporting.
Please, Mr. Dilger. Can you at least fact-check your "journalism" or minimally list your sources?
Hi Owen, welcome to the world wide web. Here, sources are presented with text signifying an attribution AND a hyperlink. That's the blue text you can click with your mouse.
Also, welcome to Apple Insider. One would expect the writers here would have "deep-Apple connections." You might also want to inform yourself about bias, as Apple the company hates Apple Insider the publication. Because they publish inside information. Ask Apple, don't just spout uninformed assumptions that you hope support your ad hominem attack.
I think this article presented both sides pretty fairly, even if its clear that Adobe's approach, in the minds of multiple tech experts, including those cited, was a slap dash of stupidity after having failed to push its Flash-Uberalles master plan.
Anyone who has such a hard time articulating why someone else is wrong (you failed to point out anything you thought was error or unfair comment in the article, apparently because you couldn't back up your opinions) but throws out so much hateful personal attacks is clearly a nut without much credibility.
Also, when you comment on a post, don't paste the entire article in. It makes you look like an idiot.
I just wish all the criticism about not being able to change font size was applied by the author to its own blog RDM. It is a pain to use that site on the iPhone.
Forget html5, who cares (just because Jobs say so?!?)
Ya. Google had to write their own Javascript layout engine for GoogleDocs because HTML5 is so cool and mature and ready for prime time, that they just couldn't stand it. Right?
Quote:
Originally Posted by emulator
Still NO 64 bit support for creative suite (only PS) still no 64 bit flash plugin and so on... .
And Premiere Pro, and AfterEffects. (And Lightroom and other apps). When is Apple going to fix all their Apps to be 64 and get them off Carbon? I mean it took until 10.6 to get a file browser over (Finder). And they still don't have QuickTime, iTunes, or FinalCut over, not to mention most of the iApps, and so on. Pot, meet kettle.
Exactly. We had a choice of a highly refined scripting engine that could have done the layout quicker/easier (with more compression). It was called Flash/Air, but Apple rejected it. So it sounds like Adobe responded with the next choice which was a native ObjectiveC application.
So you're spewing all this hate at the author for being "biased" even though you're representing Wired/Adobe without noting that you are in an extremely biased position? What a hypocrite!
Quote:
The choice was:
a) spend a fortune in a new layout engine that could handle magazines demands, but it would waste months and be unusably slow and not save what, 20% more space?
b) put up with a sub-par experience, which means magazines would just opt out completely. (They still feel their brand is 1/2 their visual representation).
c) Use image driven engine because it is faster interaction.
Seems like option C was the correct one. Which is probably why Zinio and other magazine engines made the same choice (but the article omitted that key piece of information).
How popular is Zinio? It's not, that's why it's not relevant. The fact that you can crank out a product that sucks does not mean that you have something the public wants
Quote:
I don't doubt that Adobe can and should improve the compression and encoding. But I'm glad I can read a magazine today (bloat and all), versus just drinking cool-aid on how great it will be in 5 years when HTML5 and the iPad4 hardware is really ready to do this (and reading nothing but Steve Jobs blogs in the interim).
There are plenty of iPad news sites and publications and iBooks that are already out that don't require your fantastical 4 years of development. They work great, offer real interaction, customization, great features, and aren't fellating Adobe and mourning Flash.
Also, did you get the memo that Flash Player isn't available for iPhone OS? It's not that Apple "rejected" it, its that Adobe didn't deliver it. Unless you're running a desktop OS, the only mobile OS with Flash Player is Android and its brand new beta version, which works like crap. Good luck viewing your half a gig magazine on an Android device running that.
You're welcome to express your opinions and dissent, but how about some transparency and less hypocrisy, and tone down the "you blindly love Apple" accusations when its clear you're in bed with the flaccid Adobe and making excuses for having pursued a failed strategy.
Wow, I never realized how clueless and baised Daniel Eran Dilger was, until reading this article.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Let's pretend that it would be smaller to embed the many fonts that are in each magazine, with the magazine. (Ignore that HTML5 doesn't have that capability). Figure 20-40 fonts per magazine, and you have to deal with dozens of publishers and try to get highly expensive licenses for inclusion?
How much space do you think that takes. And probably 50% of every page is ads or photos, or something interactive, that would have to be images anyways.
And can you imagine trying to re-render each page on a baby ARM processor? I'm sure you think 30 seconds to render each page would be an improvement in interactivity, but not sure the customers would think so.
Seems like anyone with an engineering background or IQ in the triple digits would quickly realize that your choices are (a) image driven representation like Zinio, Adobe and the other magazines use (b) layout driven interface like PDF, with many embedded fonts. You can get some space savings for the latter, with huge performance and interaction penalties. (And 20 times the development and production time, which means magazines and Adobe would have to charge more to break-even, and it would mean less content).
So sounds like for now, they made the better choice. I get my content sooner, cheaper and with better interactivity. Maybe that's why the other magazine engines work that way as well?
Isn't this what the writer meant when he said they should just utilize the iBookstore till they come up with something better? Aren't iBook files only a couple mb's in size?
I just wish all the criticism about not being able to change font size was applied by the author to its own blog RDM. It is a pain to use that site on the iPhone.
Sure, if you ignore layout quality, font details, rip out 95% of images and almost all the interactivity, take out the sound samples, movie clips and other things, layout a magazine in a way that makes no sense to their native format (make it like a book), then they certainly could save a lot of space. But they have to give up things like design and branding that they aren't ready to do yet. You sell it to the magazines and let me know how that works for you.
But we're back to the same fundamentals: Adobe delivered what the customers/publishers wanted (and the limitations of the technology demanded). You want the publishers to deliver something else entirely (basically their website in an App), and you're blaming Adobe because the publishers disagree with you. But the other Magazine publishers solutions that don't use Adobe technology work in the same basic way that Adobe's does. Seems like your problem isn't with Adobe, but with the decisions that all of magazine publishing is making.
I suspect Wired brings in each month in advertising what Apple Insider and Dilger's blog make in about 10 years, and there might be reasons for that. But like I tell teens; if you disagree -- quick, go start you own magazines while you still know it all. Their hundreds of years of combined experience is no match for your nearly two decades on this earth. Go get em tiger, show them how it's done!!!
P.S. Who designed the fundamental format used in iBooks? (Wasn't that Adobe?)
haha wow, just after I posted this I went into the app store and realized that AI's free app isn't there anymore.. so sorry for missleading you with this post.
But visiting there site in safari, I do see the have an "iPhone" version of their site which operates the same as there app did..
Sure, if you ignore layout quality, font details, rip out 95% of images and almost all the interactivity, take out the sound samples, movie clips and other things, layout a magazine in a way that makes no sense to their native format (make it like a book), then they certainly could save a lot of space. But they have to give up things like design and branding that they aren't ready to do yet. You sell it to the magazines and let me know how that works for you.
But we're back to the same fundamentals: Adobe delivered what the customers/publishers wanted (and the limitations of the technology demanded). You want the publishers to deliver something else entirely (basically their website in an App), and you're blaming Adobe because the publishers disagree with you. But the other Magazine publishers solutions that don't use Adobe technology work in the same basic way that Adobe's does. Seems like your problem isn't with Adobe, but with the decisions that all of magazine publishing is making.
I suspect Wired brings in each month in advertising what Apple Insider and Dilger's blog make in about 10 years, and there might be reasons for that. But like I tell teens; if you disagree -- quick, go start you own magazines while you still know it all. Their hundreds of years of combined experience is no match for your nearly two decades on this earth. Go get em tiger, show them how it's done!!!
P.S. Who designed the fundamental format used in iBooks? (Wasn't that Adobe?)
Not sure, man. Your reply kinda sounded like you though I was squaring off with you. Understandable I guess considering how most blogs go. I was genuinely asking a question and you answered it.
Comments
The 'experts' at Wired didn't anticipate that iPad wouldn't use flash?!? Really?? Three years of flash-free iPhone and still no clue? I don't buy it. Is it possible that CNaste thought they could 'muscle' it onto the iPad? That they thought iPad would be more dependent on their content than they would depend on iPad? Ironic, funny, sad... I'm not sure what the proper reaction should be. ...
It would seem that someone at Adobe seriously misled the 'experts' at Wired, who do seem pretty clueless in their own right.
I mean what's wrong with adobe just saying, "hey Flash is a fantastic product, but it looks like apple is right in saying it just isn't the right fit for mobile devices." It's not like they would be admitting they built a crap product.. Flash is a great product, it was simply NEVER meant for a mobile platform because the mobile platform was non-existant when flash was created!!
From what I read in his letter that's what steve jobs was trying to say too. Flash was a great product for what it was created for, but it didn't transition well to iPhone OS because it wasn't built for a mobile platform. They gave them 3 years to come up with something new, but they didn't so apple is now moving on.
Adobe seems to be trying as hard as they possibly can to turn this into an attack on Flash to avoid doing something that, as a companies who creates new technology, they CAN do well, which is create good products!! It just seems like such a missed oportunity on their part. I gaurentee if they create something new that oporates well on mobile OS, apple would allow it on their products.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Let's pretend that it would be smaller to embed the many fonts that are in each magazine, with the magazine. (Ignore that HTML5 doesn't have that capability). Figure 20-40 fonts per magazine, and you have to deal with dozens of publishers and try to get highly expensive licenses for inclusion?
How much space do you think that takes. And probably 50% of every page is ads or photos, or something interactive, that would have to be images anyways.
And can you imagine trying to re-render each page on a baby ARM processor? I'm sure you think 30 seconds to render each page would be an improvement in interactivity, but not sure the customers would think so.
Seems like anyone with an engineering background or IQ in the triple digits would quickly realize that your choices are (a) image driven representation like Zinio, Adobe and the other magazines use (b) layout driven interface like PDF, with many embedded fonts. You can get some space savings for the latter, with huge performance and interaction penalties. (And 20 times the development and production time, which means magazines and Adobe would have to charge more to break-even, and it would mean less content).
So sounds like for now, they made the better choice. I get my content sooner, cheaper and with better interactivity. Maybe that's why the other magazine engines work that way as well?
... So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on. ...
Sounds like you (and Wired and Adobe) are still stuck in the old paradigm. That explains why it's incomprehensible to you.
The sad problem with AppleInsider and Daniel Eran Dilger is that you have lost ALL objectivity. Apple has told you Adobe is bad, so Adobe is bad. Apple told you Flash was bad, it's the worst thing ever. When Apple decides that HTML5 no longer suits its business purpose, will you slam that as well then?
Please remember that Mr. Dilger is NOT a journalist. He's a blogger with deep-Apple connections and a bunch of ill-informed opinions that he spouts down as truth. If you consider, he's not too unlike Rush Limbaugh. Makes for great entertainment but not for truthful reporting.
Please, Mr. Dilger. Can you at least fact-check your "journalism" or minimally list your sources?
Magazine publisher Condé Nast was so sold on Adobe's Flash platform that the company didn't even anticipate Apple's iPad wouldn't support Flash. As a result, it had to resort to a clumsy workaround from Adobe to make it into the iTunes App Store.
Condé Nast designs its paper magazines using Adobe's InDesign, so it seemed like a natural progression to output its InDesign page layout into Adobe's companion Flash Professional app to generate Flash content that could be viewed on mobile devices.
That was the company's digital strategy before Apple launched iPad, and was reiterated at the going plan right up to and even after Apple outlined that the iPhone App Store wouldn't support code-generated apps exported by Flash Professional.
A failed Flash strategy
The other problem: there really aren't any popular mobile devices that display Flash. Adobe is just now getting around to releasing its beta version of a Flash Player for smartphones, but it currently only works on Android, a platform that doesn't sell lots of paid content, and only on a small subset of the newest Android devices that are fast enough to run it.
Most tablets, like HP's Slate PC that was discontinued in the wake of iPad, are designed to use Windows 7, but while that operating system supports Flash as a web browser plugin just like desktop PCs, it hasn't found any interest among users when installed on tablet devices.
The only successful tablet is currently the iPad, which like the iPhone and iPod touch has never supported Flash because Adobe has never released a suitable Flash Player for the iPhone OS in its last three years of its existence.
Too late
At this point, Apple has hitched its wagons to HTML5 for dynamic content, and won't be supporting Flash until Adobe's platform develops into something that works really well on mobiles and customers start demanding Flash playback as a feature.
Unfortunately for Adobe, that's unlikely to ever happen because the iPhone OS now makes up such a large and conspicuous chunk of the smartphone, media player, and tablet markets that content developers are now rethinking how to publish their content in a format that can be viewed by Apple's influential users.
Web developers sensitive to Apple's affluent demographic have already begun removing Flash from their websites, from Carnival cruise lines to the Virgin America airline. But rather than anticipating this trend, Condé Nast forged ahead with Adobe on a Flash-centric publishing partnership, only to find out, too late, that Adobe's backup plan for automatically generating native iPhone apps from Flash Professional wouldn't meet with Apple's App Store approval.
In order for Condé Nast to ship an iPhone OS app for iPad, it would need to build the app using Apple's development tools, not Adobe's middleware solution.
Adobe's Plan C: Objective-C
Rather than design original content for iPad or simply create a custom, standards-based website in HTML, Adobe sold Condé Nast on distributing its existing InDesign pages as large graphic files presented using a standard iPhone OS viewer app built according to Apple's rules.
The result was that Adobe could claim relevance as an essential link in the publisher chain, and Condé Nast could sell its magazine published as an iPad app without too much extra work. The downside is that there's nothing really interesting or novel about the iPad version of Wired, apart from the fact that Adobe's workaround results in a huge "app" that weighs in at around 500MB.
Adobe's solution to publishing digital content on iPad is a lot like its strategy for delivering Creative Suite content on the web: cut up Photoshop and InDesign designer's print pages into large image files fit into an HTML table. That creates a website that looks exactly like the existing print work, but which doesn't really look (or act) like a website.
"Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate"
A designer who examined the Wired app reports "each Wired issue is actually a bunch of XML files that lay out a bunch of images. And by 'a bunch of images' I mean 4,109 images weighing in at 397MB."
His investigation, published on the InterfaceLab blog, notes that "each full page is a giant image ? there are actually two images for each page: one for landscape and one for portrait mode. Yes, I?m laughing on the inside too. There is no text or HTML, just one gigantic image. The 'interactive' pieces where you can slide your finger to animate it are just a series of JPG files. When you press play on the audio file and see the progress meter animate? A series of PNG files.
"Something is wrong with this picture. Something wrong and something very lazy and/or desperate," he added.
The Adobe viewer app, hailed in the company's press release as "a new digital viewer technology that enables print publishers to bring stunning digital versions of their magazines to life," is actually not too far removed from a CD-ROM from the 90's says the author of the report.
Adobe still pleased with its work
David Burkett, Adobe's vice president and general manager for Creative Solutions, wrote in the company's press release that "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.
"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."
Adobe touts its app as "new digital viewer technology" which enables "readers to experience video content, slide-shows, 360 degree images and rotate content in vertical and horizontal modes," and notes that the Wired Reader "goes several steps further, taking advantage of the tablet form factor and enabling readers to explore magazine content using touch gestures, including a zoomed-out browse mode, to see the content of the issue at a glance. Readers are able to experience the design fidelity of a print magazine, with the dynamic interactivity of digital media."
What the Wired Reader does not do is present content that isn't already available on the Wired website. Or allow users to change font sizes or typefaces, the way Apple's iBooks app does for digital books (or as standard web browsers do). There's also no really interesting interactivity features, nor even the ability to download newer or archived issues of the magazine as they become available via Apple's in-app purchasing feature.
It's solely a digital version of the print artwork, which is precisely what Flash was intended to deliver for print publishers on the web: a way to generate content to sell digitally without doing much work or taking on any risk in creating something new.
Condé Nast's other publications, GQ and Vanity Fair, are similarly expected to use the same model for bringing their magazines to iPad. One former employee of Condé Nast noted that this may be the case, not just out of laziness, but also because the publisher wants to be able to count digital editions as part of its distribution numbers mixed in with physical magazine sales for advertising purposes. Making them essentially the same thing helps in that regard.
Magazines in HTML5
Not all publishers are sold on cranking out the most elementary electronic versions of their paper magazines. At Google's I/O conference, Sports Illustrated demonstrated an HTML5 version of its work that marks up sections and articles using new structure elements and adds drag and drop navigation features (for creating bookmarks of embedded media such as video clips), while also taking advantage of Web Workers and other features of HTML5 that makes the content significant faster than rendering objects in plain JavaScript or Flash.
The digital publication, "in beta," also presented embedded animated visualizations based on a live survey, integration with Google Maps, and even rich, immersive advertising similar to the iAd program Apple demonstrated for iPhone OS 4 (as shown in the video below).
Despite a variety of interesting features in the demo, it did not appear to include any special ability to increase font sizes or change font face outside of the browser itself. That makes it somewhat questionable why magazine publishers don't simply sell their periodicals as iBooks on Apple's platform, which already supports rich content in an open format that publishers can also sell in competing digital venues.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
Sounds like you (and Wired and Adobe) are still stuck in the old paradigm. That explains why it's incomprehensible to you.
Which old paradigm is that? Designing and publishing content for consumers?
Wow, I never realized how clueless and baised Daniel Eran Dilger was, until reading this article.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Yeah Wired has such subtle design with its orange on black text and interwoven fonts ad absurdum. But seriously, the problem design wonks have with the web is their own problem. Your customers aren't interested in your design skills, they're looking for content. If that weren't the case, you'd be selling your fancy designs, and the web would be failing to find readers.
What people like you need to grasp is that people go to content sources for information, not to marvel at your design skills. So stop firing your writing staff and fire some of the queens sitting in front of Photoshop and InDesign and just deliver high quality content, like society enjoyed before the brief period of the 90s when real content was overshadowed by egregious design.
Also, get informed about HTML. Sure, it's not intended to be a pixel perfect representation of print content, but that's why its useful, accessible (ever heard of disabilities or old eyes?) flexible and does not need some massive processor to render as you so idiotically suggested.
Forget html5, who cares (just because Jobs say so?!?)
Still NO 64 bit support for creative suite (only PS) still no 64 bit flash plugin and so on... x64 is more important than some html standard that won't even be around long (if it catches on at all).
sadly, you are mistaken about html5. i agree with you about adobe and 64-bit. should have happened with cs4, probably won't happen until cs8 or 9.
my beef with flash is that adobe's own product, flash plug-in, doesn't even work?consistently? using their own product to produce content.
Sounds like you (and Wired and Adobe) are still stuck in the old paradigm. That explains why it's incomprehensible to you.
Exactly. We had a choice of a highly refined scripting engine that could have done the layout quicker/easier (with more compression). It was called Flash/Air, but Apple rejected it. So it sounds like Adobe responded with the next choice which was a native ObjectiveC application.
The choice was:
a) spend a fortune in a new layout engine that could handle magazines demands, but it would waste months and be unusably slow and not save what, 20% more space?
b) put up with a sub-par experience, which means magazines would just opt out completely. (They still feel their brand is 1/2 their visual representation).
c) Use image driven engine because it is faster interaction.
Seems like option C was the correct one. Which is probably why Zinio and other magazine engines made the same choice (but the article omitted that key piece of information).
I don't doubt that Adobe can and should improve the compression and encoding. But I'm glad I can read a magazine today (bloat and all), versus just drinking cool-aid on how great it will be in 5 years when HTML5 and the iPad4 hardware is really ready to do this (and reading nothing but Steve Jobs blogs in the interim).
I can't help but wonder given the deep analysis and inside information presented here what sources that AppleInsider used to glean all of this?
The sad problem with AppleInsider and Daniel Eran Dilger is that you have lost ALL objectivity. Apple has told you Adobe is bad, so Adobe is bad. Apple told you Flash was bad, it's the worst thing ever. When Apple decides that HTML5 no longer suits its business purpose, will you slam that as well then?
Please remember that Mr. Dilger is NOT a journalist. He's a blogger with deep-Apple connections and a bunch of ill-informed opinions that he spouts down as truth. If you consider, he's not too unlike Rush Limbaugh. Makes for great entertainment but not for truthful reporting.
Please, Mr. Dilger. Can you at least fact-check your "journalism" or minimally list your sources?
Hi Owen, welcome to the world wide web. Here, sources are presented with text signifying an attribution AND a hyperlink. That's the blue text you can click with your mouse.
Also, welcome to Apple Insider. One would expect the writers here would have "deep-Apple connections." You might also want to inform yourself about bias, as Apple the company hates Apple Insider the publication. Because they publish inside information. Ask Apple, don't just spout uninformed assumptions that you hope support your ad hominem attack.
I think this article presented both sides pretty fairly, even if its clear that Adobe's approach, in the minds of multiple tech experts, including those cited, was a slap dash of stupidity after having failed to push its Flash-Uberalles master plan.
Anyone who has such a hard time articulating why someone else is wrong (you failed to point out anything you thought was error or unfair comment in the article, apparently because you couldn't back up your opinions) but throws out so much hateful personal attacks is clearly a nut without much credibility.
Also, when you comment on a post, don't paste the entire article in. It makes you look like an idiot.
I just wish all the criticism about not being able to change font size was applied by the author to its own blog RDM. It is a pain to use that site on the iPhone.
How much do you pay for issues of RDM?
Forget html5, who cares (just because Jobs say so?!?)
Ya. Google had to write their own Javascript layout engine for GoogleDocs because HTML5 is so cool and mature and ready for prime time, that they just couldn't stand it. Right?
Still NO 64 bit support for creative suite (only PS) still no 64 bit flash plugin and so on... .
And Premiere Pro, and AfterEffects. (And Lightroom and other apps). When is Apple going to fix all their Apps to be 64 and get them off Carbon? I mean it took until 10.6 to get a file browser over (Finder). And they still don't have QuickTime, iTunes, or FinalCut over, not to mention most of the iApps, and so on. Pot, meet kettle.
Exactly. We had a choice of a highly refined scripting engine that could have done the layout quicker/easier (with more compression). It was called Flash/Air, but Apple rejected it. So it sounds like Adobe responded with the next choice which was a native ObjectiveC application.
So you're spewing all this hate at the author for being "biased" even though you're representing Wired/Adobe without noting that you are in an extremely biased position? What a hypocrite!
The choice was:
a) spend a fortune in a new layout engine that could handle magazines demands, but it would waste months and be unusably slow and not save what, 20% more space?
b) put up with a sub-par experience, which means magazines would just opt out completely. (They still feel their brand is 1/2 their visual representation).
c) Use image driven engine because it is faster interaction.
Seems like option C was the correct one. Which is probably why Zinio and other magazine engines made the same choice (but the article omitted that key piece of information).
How popular is Zinio? It's not, that's why it's not relevant. The fact that you can crank out a product that sucks does not mean that you have something the public wants
I don't doubt that Adobe can and should improve the compression and encoding. But I'm glad I can read a magazine today (bloat and all), versus just drinking cool-aid on how great it will be in 5 years when HTML5 and the iPad4 hardware is really ready to do this (and reading nothing but Steve Jobs blogs in the interim).
There are plenty of iPad news sites and publications and iBooks that are already out that don't require your fantastical 4 years of development. They work great, offer real interaction, customization, great features, and aren't fellating Adobe and mourning Flash.
Also, did you get the memo that Flash Player isn't available for iPhone OS? It's not that Apple "rejected" it, its that Adobe didn't deliver it. Unless you're running a desktop OS, the only mobile OS with Flash Player is Android and its brand new beta version, which works like crap. Good luck viewing your half a gig magazine on an Android device running that.
You're welcome to express your opinions and dissent, but how about some transparency and less hypocrisy, and tone down the "you blindly love Apple" accusations when its clear you're in bed with the flaccid Adobe and making excuses for having pursued a failed strategy.
Wow, I never realized how clueless and baised Daniel Eran Dilger was, until reading this article.
So please explain how you would deliver pixel perfect representations of a magazine without using images? Magazines brands are based on many extremely subtle parts of design: the exact font, spacing and weighting of the line-layout. The huge photographs spread throughout the page, and so on.
Let's pretend that it would be smaller to embed the many fonts that are in each magazine, with the magazine. (Ignore that HTML5 doesn't have that capability). Figure 20-40 fonts per magazine, and you have to deal with dozens of publishers and try to get highly expensive licenses for inclusion?
How much space do you think that takes. And probably 50% of every page is ads or photos, or something interactive, that would have to be images anyways.
And can you imagine trying to re-render each page on a baby ARM processor? I'm sure you think 30 seconds to render each page would be an improvement in interactivity, but not sure the customers would think so.
Seems like anyone with an engineering background or IQ in the triple digits would quickly realize that your choices are (a) image driven representation like Zinio, Adobe and the other magazines use (b) layout driven interface like PDF, with many embedded fonts. You can get some space savings for the latter, with huge performance and interaction penalties. (And 20 times the development and production time, which means magazines and Adobe would have to charge more to break-even, and it would mean less content).
So sounds like for now, they made the better choice. I get my content sooner, cheaper and with better interactivity. Maybe that's why the other magazine engines work that way as well?
Isn't this what the writer meant when he said they should just utilize the iBookstore till they come up with something better? Aren't iBook files only a couple mb's in size?
I just wish all the criticism about not being able to change font size was applied by the author to its own blog RDM. It is a pain to use that site on the iPhone.
Appleinsider has an App.. just use that.
Aren't iBook files only a couple mb's in size?
Sure, if you ignore layout quality, font details, rip out 95% of images and almost all the interactivity, take out the sound samples, movie clips and other things, layout a magazine in a way that makes no sense to their native format (make it like a book), then they certainly could save a lot of space. But they have to give up things like design and branding that they aren't ready to do yet. You sell it to the magazines and let me know how that works for you.
But we're back to the same fundamentals: Adobe delivered what the customers/publishers wanted (and the limitations of the technology demanded). You want the publishers to deliver something else entirely (basically their website in an App), and you're blaming Adobe because the publishers disagree with you. But the other Magazine publishers solutions that don't use Adobe technology work in the same basic way that Adobe's does. Seems like your problem isn't with Adobe, but with the decisions that all of magazine publishing is making.
I suspect Wired brings in each month in advertising what Apple Insider and Dilger's blog make in about 10 years, and there might be reasons for that. But like I tell teens; if you disagree -- quick, go start you own magazines while you still know it all. Their hundreds of years of combined experience is no match for your nearly two decades on this earth. Go get em tiger, show them how it's done!!!
P.S. Who designed the fundamental format used in iBooks? (Wasn't that Adobe?)
Appleinsider has an App.. just use that.
haha wow, just after I posted this I went into the app store and realized that AI's free app isn't there anymore.. so sorry for missleading you with this post.
But visiting there site in safari, I do see the have an "iPhone" version of their site which operates the same as there app did..
Sure, if you ignore layout quality, font details, rip out 95% of images and almost all the interactivity, take out the sound samples, movie clips and other things, layout a magazine in a way that makes no sense to their native format (make it like a book), then they certainly could save a lot of space. But they have to give up things like design and branding that they aren't ready to do yet. You sell it to the magazines and let me know how that works for you.
But we're back to the same fundamentals: Adobe delivered what the customers/publishers wanted (and the limitations of the technology demanded). You want the publishers to deliver something else entirely (basically their website in an App), and you're blaming Adobe because the publishers disagree with you. But the other Magazine publishers solutions that don't use Adobe technology work in the same basic way that Adobe's does. Seems like your problem isn't with Adobe, but with the decisions that all of magazine publishing is making.
I suspect Wired brings in each month in advertising what Apple Insider and Dilger's blog make in about 10 years, and there might be reasons for that. But like I tell teens; if you disagree -- quick, go start you own magazines while you still know it all. Their hundreds of years of combined experience is no match for your nearly two decades on this earth. Go get em tiger, show them how it's done!!!
P.S. Who designed the fundamental format used in iBooks? (Wasn't that Adobe?)
Not sure, man. Your reply kinda sounded like you though I was squaring off with you. Understandable I guess considering how most blogs go. I was genuinely asking a question and you answered it.
Thanks.
Which old paradigm is that? Designing and publishing content for consumers?
In a phrase, the pixel perfect paradigm.