This is a paywall test for the new social media feature in v20. When you reach the limited to the number of articles you can read in web viewer, a paywall appears. I set the threshold to 3 for the DPS Tips app. Obviously, setting up a paywall is more useful with retail content than with an educational app.
For obtain full access to the DPS Tips app, click this link: DPS Tips. The new version with social sharing enabled is currently in review at Apple.
Apple approved the new version of the DPS Tips app.
Instead of simply updating the app, which is usually the easiest approach, I recommend that you remove DPS Tips and then install it from the App Store. Re-installing is especially important if you have an iPad 3. A current limitation prevents the high-resolution rendition folios from being available if the library has ever “noticed” the low-resolution folios, even if you haven’t downloaded them. This issue should be fixed in one of the upcoming releases. If you’re creating renditions for your folios, remember to publish both renditions before you notify users with a push. To be safe, the best approach is to publish the high-resolution rendition first.
The DPS Tips has been approved for the Apple App Store and Android Market, though I haven’t updated the Android content. Amazon still hasn’t approved the app due to a beta in-app purchase issue that should be resolved soon.
Here are some changes I made to the app:
* I added renditions by using one set of 1024×768 source files. If you have an iPad 3, the cover images in the library should include “2048×1536.” If not, remove and re-install the app.
* I divided the old overlays folio into two folios: one basic and one advanced. The advanced folio includes a few new articles and an updated article on pullout tabs. The new pop-up video article includes a rocket launch effect that’s so cheesy not even my 8-year-old son liked it. Colin even asked me not to credit him for the video. I might have to revisit that example.
* I added a new article to the Effects folio that includes an HTML5 scratch-off example. It links to a Cookbooks recipe where you can download and repurpose the HTML code.
Here are some folio size stats. For some reason, the PDF files were relatively much larger than what I had seen in my testing. I need to ask around about a possible bug.
When the PDF image format was first made available for DPS articles, the format was limited. Most importantly, interactive overlays were not supported in PDF-based articles, so most designers stuck with the JPG/PNG image format unless they wanted users to be able to pinch & zoom on a page.
With the v18 release of the tools, that changed. Now, all interactive overlays in PDF articles work just as well as they do in JPG/PNG articles.
With the new retina display iPad, using the PDF format has now become the recommended choice for image format. PDF articles are smaller than JPG/PNG articles, and vector content is maintained, resulting in improved scaling. However, there are still some differences between the PDF and JPG/PNG image formats that you should be aware of.
The Digital Publishing Suite Tips app is now available in the Apple Store. It’s part user guide, part cookbook, and part blog. If you have an iPad and you want to learn about the new Digital Publishing Suite tools, download the app and start playing.
Currently, the DPS Tips app includes two issues — Folio Basics and Interactive Overlays. The Folio Basics issue provides videos and tutorials for the new acrobat.com-based workflow that came out last week. The Interactive Overlays issue shows an example of each overlay type and explains how to create it.
Both folios include workarounds, tips, best practices, and links to interesting apps.
I’m also working on a third folio called “How Did They Do That?” It will show examples from iPad apps. I have a few articles lined up, but I’m looking for more examples. Please let me know if you’d like to show how you created an article in a folio or you there’s an article in someone else’s app that you’d like to figure out. You can reach me at bbringhu at adobe dot com.
The link to the DPS Tips app is here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digital-publishing-suite-tips/id436199090?mt=8
Here’s the link that jumps straight to iTunes:
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/digital-publishing-suite-tips/id436199090?mt=8
Enjoy!
If you’re creating magazine apps for the iPad and other mobile devices, you have a lot of design decisions to make. Let’s go over a few of them.
Single-Folio or Multi-Folio Viewer App?
When you submit your content to the Apple Store or Android Market, each magazine or book requires its own branded viewer.
For most projects, the decision of whether to create a single-folio or multiple-folio viewer is straight-forward. If you intend to create a book or a one-off promotional piece, such as the Essential Guide to TRON, create a single-folio viewer. If you intend to create a magazine with multiple issues, such as The New Yorker, you need to create a multi-folio viewer that allows your customers to download folios as you publish them on the Adobe fulfillment server.
For multi-folio viewers, Adobe plans to charge $0.30 per download. Adobe does not charge anything for single-folio viewers, because they’re downloaded from the Apple Store or Android Market, not from the Adobe fulfillment server.
Orientation — Vertical, Horizontal, or Both?
You can create portrait-only, landscape-only, or dual-orientation folios. Note that you cannot mix and match orientation types, such as a horizontal-only and dual-orientation articles in the same folio. The layouts of single-orientation folios do not change when the customer rotates the iPad.
In a prerelease forum thread, one publisher claimed that magazine apps should be portrait-only because people are accustomed to reading portrait magazines. I don’t think that reasoning holds up. Aren’t those same people also accustomed to reading websites on landscape monitors? And watching t.v. and movies on landscape screens? I don’t think there’s a “right” orientation for the iPad.
I’ve seen well-designed portrait-only and landscape-only magazines. The new Golf Digest and Reader’s Digest apps are portrait only. One of my favorite apps, Harvest to Heat, is landscape only.
Golf Digest is portrait only.
Harvest to Heat is landscape only.
One major advantage to portrait-only or landscape-only folios is that you have to create only one design. If you have a printed magazine, converting the layout to a 768×1024 page size isn’t nearly as difficult as converting it to both a 768×1024 and 1024×768 page size.
The Adobe InDesign CS4 Conversion Guide is now available. It includes chapters on the “Top 10 Differences You Need to Understand,” the “Top 25 Shortcuts You Should Know,” and more handy reference material.
For additional QuarkXPress resources, see the Help topic on opening QuarkXPress documents in InDesign.
For those of you who aren’t aware of Kuler, go into InDesign, choose Window > Extensions > Kuler, and start playing around. Kuler is a set of colors and themes designed by an online community. You can view videos here and here, and you can read about Kuler in an InDesign Help topic.
For those of you who’ve already played around with Kuler, you may want to check out the new Community Pulse feature. Community Pulse is a data visualization that displays colors of downloaded Kuler themes on a color wheel. Users can explore the relative popularity of colors by different countries, time periods, and tags.
This screenshot shows the popularity of colors downloaded in the USA (l) and Brazil (r) in Spring 2008. The larger circles and bars indicate more popular colors (i.e., themes with those colors were downloaded more often).
There is a lot of data packed into the feature. To get started:
- Sign in with your Adobe ID to change the menu options
- Mouse over the histogram to see colors by hue on the color wheel
- Try the granularity slider to see more or less color detail
- Select the comparison icon (two circles) to compare/contrast views
You can read more about Community Pulse here.
One of the nice things about having Help on the Web is that I can update the Help files between releases. If someone points out an error or omission, I can edit the source files, and a couple weeks later, it’s as though the files were never wrong.
I can also add new topics. As I’ve been analyzing search data and survey comments, I realized I missed a few things.
A Complete List of Videos
Even though I had already blogged about videos, several people requested a list of videos organized by topic. Your wish is my command. I created a new Help topic that organizes videos by subject.
The Navigator panel
When I heard that the program team was removing the Navigator panel, I made the mistake of deleting the old topic rather than leaving it in and explaining what happened to the feature. “Navigator” ended up being the #4 search term in November. Ouch. So I added a new topic cleverly entitled, “About the Navigator panel.” I explain that it’s been replaced by Power Zoom.
Contact Sheets
“Contact sheets” was a top 10 search entry, but there’s nothing in Help on the Web that tells people how to create contact sheets. Fortunately, a few bloggers and authors have written about using Adobe products to create contact sheets, so if people did a search, they were most likely able to find something to help them out. Still, if people search only within Help, I don’t want them to draw the dreaded “No results found” message. So I created a topic called “Creating contact sheets.”
Foreign Affairs
Every now and then, someone asks how to edit Japanese or Arabic text in InDesign. Even though I create an entirely different Help system for Asian versions of InDesign, I realized I never pointed this out to English customers in Help. So I wrote a new topic called “Working with additional languages.”
If you notice any errors in these new topics, or if you’re aware of any other gaps or mistakes in InDesign Help, please let me know. Just leave a comment.
