March 11, 2010
Multiscreen authoring is a challenge for our design customers, whether they are visual designers or web designers. They constantly are thinking about how to broaden the reach of their designs for their customers. We are committed to making that as easy as possible, without having to sacrifice the beauty or precision of their designs. We also are constantly looking at the best technologies to make that happen. There has been much discussion around whether or not html5 and css3 will make it easier for designers to reach new devices. We think it will.
In the following demo the team leverages CSS3 Media Queries to do multiscreen authoring. In this case a Dreamweaver user can dynamically go between style sheets based on the size of the layout for a particular device. The CSS for a smartphone, vs. a tablet vs. a website are all different and are dynamically exchanged based on how the user sizes the screen. There are no defined best practices for multi-screen authoring yet so this kind of experimentation is critical as it really helps our teams understand the potential workflows. How do you envision authoring for multi-screen experiences?
Recently, we attended technology demos across our design and web products. We saw a range of prototypes, many of which were focused on new services, multiscreen authoring leveraging html5 and css3. We have been spending a lot of time internally thinking about how our tools can best support and take advantage of some of the new functionality in HTML 5, and we wanted to share a couple of early ideas with you.
A couple of demos are worth highlighting. An earlier version of this demo was shown at Adobe Max last year. The workflow was focused on artwork (a Chart) that was taken from illustrator and placed into Dreamweaver which converts it into code and displays it via the HTML5 Canvas tag.
The user was then able to bind the chart to an XML data file. What was cool about this was that a designer doesn’t need to care about the underlying technology, they can just focus on the results.
As you may have guessed from the demo there has to be some sort of JavaScript framework in place that manipulates the chart to respond to the data in the XML file. So how would this play out in real world usage? We’re thinking about tying this workflow to a new class of Ajax widgets that can leverage Canvas to provide richer interaction along with a clean abstraction layer to allow designers real control in a tool such as Illustrator.
How would you use this technology?
March 10, 2010
Welcome to the “Design & Web” blog. We run product development & business strategy at Adobe, focusing on the needs of our Design and Web customers. We will use this forum to discuss product plans, technology prototypes and even broader topics around market trends. Our commitment is to ensure our tools and services continue to support evolving technologies so our customers can have the greatest impact.
We get the privilege of working with many talented product managers and engineers. We also get to see some great demos and pitches for new products,features and services. We’d like to share some of these with you to get your feedback and see what resonates. To be clear, we are giving you a very early view. It won’t be in the next version of CS.
We look forward to seeing your comments as we put out future posts.
Paul & Lea
