[DavidCart]

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.

[cgc]

Zinio, which uses Adobe Air, works with iPad, OSX, and Windows...

[Cold Warrior]

AppleInsider | Adobe, Cond� Nast scrambled to get Wired app on Apple's iPad

Apparently this publishing platform sounds like it just makes everything into jpeg or png, which accounts for the huge 400 MB app size. If many publishers do this, it'll gobble up storage but also slow consumption. Subscribed to a few mags, how's your 2 GB app update coming?

[mduell]

And with the text all in images, no copy and paste. Stellar.

[andi*pandi]

The app is as slick as you'd expect from Wired, but I suspect most people were buying just to try. Let's see whether next month's issue is as big a seller.

InDesign as app creator. Hmm.

[::maroma::]

Yeah I got the Wired app just to see what its like. And its pretty neat, but there are a few drawbacks, most what people have already stated here.

Huge size, no selectable text, no pinch-to-zoom. But it was still a fun experience. And I think for a first shot at this sort of publishing vehicle, I think its pretty darn good. I'd like to see those issues taken care of soon though. Also would like a nice subscription price ($5 per issue adds up fast), and an auto-download when a new issue arrives.

Overall, good start. In a year we're going to see some seriously slick magazine experiences on the iPad.

[jokell82]

The Sports Illustrated HTML5 version looks pretty slick:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...ples_ipad.html

(Towards the bottom of the article)

[analogue SPRINKLES]

This wired app and Adobe Publishing sounds like a huge load of garbage. What they do add a plugin that exports everything as a flat image in both portrait and landscape orientation in XML files? Why the hell just not make it a PDF then.

Or even crazier why not use HTML5 as 100% of the devices it is viewed on it will work? Even better it will be about 1000x smaller, automatically fit to screen in each orientation and you can have a richer experience.

Naaa, not from those hard workers at Adobe.

I hope someone else comes out with a better publishing system that uses HTML5 and knocks them off the map. Perhaps even apple?!

[analogue SPRINKLES]

Originally Posted by jokell82 

The Sports Illustrated HTML5 version looks pretty slick:
AppleInsider | Adobe, Condé Nast scrambled to get Wired app on Apple's iPad

(Towards the bottom of the article)

It looks good for sure but it is still nothing near what they could be doing as it still just looks like a magazine layout with clipped photos and wrapping text.

For now it is a matter of laziness/transition as they don't want to have to design 2 looks for each issue. In the future when they are mostly (or only) selling digital versions they should re-think the layout so it doesn't have that multi-colum split into pages magazine look on a digital device.

[::maroma::]

Originally Posted by analogue SPRINKLES 

This wired app and Adobe Publishing sounds like a huge load of garbage. What they do add a plugin that exports everything as a flat image in both portrait and landscape orientation in XML files? Why the hell just not make it a PDF then.

Or even crazier why not use HTML5 as 100% of the devices it is viewed on it will work? Even better it will be about 1000x smaller, automatically fit to screen in each orientation and you can have a richer experience.

Naaa, not from those hard workers at Adobe.

I hope someone else comes out with a better publishing system that uses HTML5 and knocks them off the map. Perhaps even apple?!

Have you seen the Wired app? Its not merely flat PDFs. It has interactivity to it, with buttons to push to play sounds, 3D models you can spin around, video clips, etc. So its more akin to a fancy interactive PDF, and I'm sure the InDesign plugin makes it 100x easier to create something like this than to use any of the traditional tools.