Secrets & Happiness of Digital Publishing

Secrets & Happiness of Digital Publishing is now on Apple News.

Today Adobe announced Adobe Publish to be available this summer of 2015 — bringing our vision of digital publishing to market.

Check these slides from the the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin

Fast Company launched a new app that that provides a preview of a completely re-imagined mobile experience that Adobe will bring to market in the summer of 2015.

Check out the new FastCompany app for iPhone and iPad

We developed this new experience together with FastCompany for about a year now and are proud to announce it today!

This new app gives an early look at Adobe's vision for Digital Publishing: continuous, article-centric publishing capabilities and a focused reading and browsing experience.

The new app allows the FastCompany brand to reach their readers in new ways. Each morning FastCompany editors will select 5 articles to be featured in the »Our Picks« section. In »Latest Stories« you find content from all of FastCompany's sources (which you can filter down to what you want to see). Each month, the »Magazine« section highlights highly-curated and highly-designed articles under each month's story arch.

Jeremy Clark (Director of Experience Design) wrote an exclusive look behind the scenes of our collaboration with FastCompany. Nick Bogaty (Lead for Adobe's digital publishing business) wrote more about how the FastCompany app shines light on what Adobe will offer all customers this summer.

Download the App for iPhone and iPad

After over a year of silence, I am attempting to relaunch this blog — to be honest, I have a lot of ideas to write about, just never enough time. So we will see where this goes. There are still about 400 users visiting this site every week, about a quarter from the audience from two years ago. It will take some time to regain that audience and I have to find out what kind of new content works.

Today I am reintroducing this blog under a new location: publishing.how

Future Focus

Now that digital publishing isn’t a new thing anymore workflows established and patterns emerged. In my work as User Experience Designer for Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite I focussed my last two years on the reader’s experience when enjoying digitally readable content.

This blog will look at the intersection between User Experience and Digital Publishing and focus on the consumer of digital content in news, magazine and corporate publishing apps. I will look at examples and developments in the market as well as provide continuing coverage of Adobe’s Digital Publishing solution.

In light of Adobe's DPS Release 28 and the availability of iOS7, I updated the Icon Template with new sizes and new assets.

The new template, available for Photoshop CC, uses the new Adobe Generator to create assets automatically. Placing your artwork still works the same: Just update one smart object and the new icons populate into the document. After activating Generator, each time you save the document Photoshop will generate assets in both retina and non-retina size automatically.

The template now includes launch images and a placeholder for the new navigation bar icons.

This article is also available in serbo-croatic, thanks to Anja Skrba from webhostinggeeks

When you develop your DPS app (or any iOS app) you then, near the end, need to test the app on your device and also send it to your clients for them to test.

The most obvious way for distributing was always sending the .ipa file via email to your client, let them drag it into iTunes and sync their iPads with iTunes. This is a tedious process, for you and for the client.

But you can also distribute your development app »Over the Air« and install right from the iPad browser. This is available for Pro and Enterprise, even Single Edition.

Note: This will not bypass the App Store for final distribution. This is only for testing your development app and you still need the UDIDs of all the iPads you want to test on (Enterprise customers can sign an app without the UDID binding).

In short: You create a xml manifest.plist file and upload it with your .ipa file and one icon to your own server. You then create a special link that points to the manifest and the iPad will then install the app wirelessly to the provisioned iOS device.

You just need three files:

Your developer-viewer.ipa

A 57 × 57 icon

manifest.plist file describing your app

So basically, you have everything ready except the manifest.plist file which we will look at now.

manifest.plist file

The manifest.plist file is a short xml file that describes the location and metadata of your app:

You can create this file in your text editor. You can start with this example. Basically you just need to edit 4 places:

software-package: url http://nybok.de/viewer/developer-viewer.ipa

First, change the url value inside to the absolute location (including the full http://-Link) of the .ipa file you will upload later

display-image: url http://nybok.de/viewer/apple-adhoc-57.png

The same for the 57 pixel png icon

bundle-identifier: de.nybok.showcase

The bundle identifier has to exactly match the one you see in the overview in Viewer Builder

title: our lovely showcase

this required string will be visible in the alert dialog prior to installing.

If there’s something wrong in the manifest file you probably won’t get an error later — the app will just not install, which makes this a bit hard to test.

Uploading the files

Then upload all the files onto your webserver. Your webserver should serve the manifest.plist file as text/xml plist and the ipa file as application/octet-stream ipa (should work on most servers).

If you don’t have a webserver, your public dropbox directory might work as well.

Generating the special URL

Then you just need to point your iPad to the the manifest.plist file with this special URL:

itms-services://?action=download-manifest&amp ;;;;url=https://nybok.de/viewer/manifest.plist

Note that you should serve the link to the plist file through HTTPS.

This will load the manifest.plist file in which the iPad will look up for the .ipa file and — if everything looks ok — starts the download on the iOS device.

Of course this URL is not fun to type in and looks ugly. You can use a shortening URL to make the URL more readable. Unfortunately, bit.ly does not allow shortening itms-services://-URLs. I only know of tinyurl.com that will do this and where you can also set up a custom short URL. So the shortened URL I use here is

http://tinyurl.com/nybok-showcase

which I then just type into the iPad’s Browser or send via eMail to my client.

I use this type of distribution for any app I create, even for tests on my own because it is so easy, once set up you just need to replace the ipa file on your server.

What's up lately? I am heads down with XD at Adobe. Read an interview about my work in ecollege July 2013 by Haeme Ulrich.

With basil.js you can generate designs like processing.org but using InDesign as output. This is a great extension to InDesign and makes scripting available to designers and artists.

BULLETT Interactive for iPad- The Surreal and Romance Issues

Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Release 25

Last week, Adobe released a new version of the Digital Publishing Suite, Release 25, wich has some big impact on the experience of digital magazine readers.

I am particularly excited about this release, because it is the first release since I joined the Experience Design Team at Adobe.

When you look at the screen above, you immediately notice a big difference in the way the Library displays Issues of the Magazine. We worked hard to simplify to UI and make sure the publisher's content stands out.

I highly recommend you to read through the complete release notes to get a know of what shipped in this release, while I will focus on the changes on the user experience with this post.

For all publishers that use DPS as their digital magazine workflow, I highly recommend checking out what is new and what is applicable for their Magazine.

New Library Layout

We wanted to bring the publisher's content to the front and keep the overall experience where simple, unlike in the previous releases, the Library UI more felt a place to manage magazines, rather than explore content.

We redesigned the Library using some swiss-style design. Not for the holes in the UI, but because we used Helvetica and a Grid. That helped us a lot in defining a invisible rhythm, although it is hard to keep that up all the time.

We have thrown out all the buttons and simplified the interactions on each cover. To remove issues form the device, there is now a separate place in the App that lists all issues on the device and also displays the size, making it very easy to remove multiple issues at once or choose the ones that occupy the most space.

Promo HTML Area

Our new Library displays a full size HTML Banner at the top of the Library Portion (for Enterprise Customers). Although this place was a little bit smaller before and called »Entitlement Banner« I would love to see publishers using that prominent space to engage with the reader.

Like you see in the example of »The Pluralist Mag«, publishers could promote articles, include content from their websites or have messaging depending on the reader's status (subscriber, regular reader, logged in). Instead of just displaying the same (annoying) subscription message all the time, I would love to see some creative examples on how to use this space and turn more users into readers or even subscribers by promoting the magazine's content and use this space dynamically.

First Free Folio

The other feature I am excited about is the possibility to give new users the latest issue for free. When a new reader installs the Magazine's App for the first time, they can receive the latest issue for free (if the publisher enabled that feature) — and the best part: it automatically starts downloading when the app is launched for the first time.

That makes it very easy for new readers to get into the magazine's content and a publisher can use this as a marketing tool to attract new readers. There are more options to it, that allow the publisher to send a message to readers of a free issue (in an HTML article).

Background Downloading (Release 24)

This is a feature that actually came into DPS as part of release 24, but I think it is a necessary improvement to the user experience that every publisher should use. It allows a running download to finish while the app is closed. That means a user can easily start the download and continue to use their iPads how they want and the download will finish in the background (actually, Apple allows for 10 more minutes of download time in the background, but it should be enough).

Improvements to the Reading Experience

There are a couple of changes to the look once the reader is inside a Folio. The most important change is the treatment of the scrubber. The little dragger at the bottom of the screen is now the focal point to navigate through the magazine quickly. Touching and Moving it now automatically opens into Browse Mode (similar to how the iPhone behaves).

You may have also noticed that there is no button in the top right corner anymore that previously evoked Browse Mode. A reader can also just tap on the scrubber dragger to Open Browse into Browse Mode.

——

There are lot of things that changed in the last few releases and we continue to develop, listen to feedback and improve. 

I would be happy to hear your ideas in the comments, and I am interested to see how publishers develop to our new approach. I think the first one that released with the new UI is The Red Bulletin — congratulations!