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March 04, 2008
Integration, mission
Integration, mission: A signpost here. Michael Ninness of the Adobe InDesign team showed a sneak peek of a "compile to SWF" ability. Why should you care, if you don't use InDesign? Because it signifies what's going on behind the scenes inside Adobe. The company is fully committed to this next-generation publishing platform, whether publishing documents, presentations, interactions or applications. Adobe finalized the Macromedia acquisition in December 2005, and quickly integrated the companies and software to produce Creative Suite 3 in April 2007. CS3 has been very successful, because it removed some of the common barriers to realworld workflows. But now things really start to get interesting, because the different product groups have had some time to undertake new work, new capabilities. What's it mean to you? There isn't one single "designer/developer workflow", where people fall neatly into buckets. We need a general publishing capability, where different types of creative tools speak with each other. Even if you don't use visual, layout, video or other tools yourself, when your partners keep their Creative Suite updated, things tend to be much easier for you. Michael's sneakpeek showed the congruency across Adobe towards bringing this about. Michael closed with a great answer to "Why in the world would you use InDesign to create Flash?" "Because InDesign is a general-purpose layout tool, and it shouldn't matter if you're outputting to paper or to pixels... Print is not dead, but design for print _only_ is dying. As advertising dollars shift to online media, traditional print designers are wondering how they can participate in a changing market. We believe one of Adobe's roles is to enable the transition... This morning's technology preview demonstrated what kind of integration could be possible between two of Adobe's flagship products." I hate teasing, but what I've been seeing of CS4 efforts has been mindboggling -- the demos have impressed even jaundiced ol' me. And the best part is that it's still a very worthwhile time to upgrade to CS3. Anyway, check out the article, for a good hidden signal on how all the varied creative worlds are starting to merge, and the types of improvements we'll see in the near future.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 4, 2008 08:04 AM
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Comments
Michael's answer couldn't have been better if it were written by the Adobe marketing machine. That's a great answer and even me, a developer, understood what he meant and could see the vision (the "why?").
I'm interested in seeing what CS4 brings to the table...especially in the Flash Platform arena. ;-) Keep rockin' Adobe and keep informing us on the tidbits JD.
Posted by: John C. Bland II at March 4, 2008 09:09 AM
This is a very interesting and necessary development. I see SWF becoming 'the' ebook platform. PDF is great, but its interactivity is limited, and you're pretty much stuck the 'binding' and controls that are provided by Reader (or Preview or Foxit or whatever other PDF viewer one is using).
For example you can't create those elegant 'page turn' effects in PDF (even with its extensive javascript capabilities). Sure, not every ebook would want or need such effects, but some might well benefit from a more 'designed' kind of user interaction with the 'pages'. Good example: What about pop-up books? You simply can't make them in PDF, but you can make a very fair approximate in Flash.
I'm also reminded of Apple's idea for QuickTime Player 'skins': I think it was Frank Casanova who said "Skin the content, not the player", and it was one of the features that made QuickTime an easy sell with clients, until Apple decided they didn't really care about interactive QuickTime after all.
Even so, the opportunity to create a truly 'branded' electronic document, right down to the shape of the window, the behavior of the next/previous buttons and the way the pages 'turn' or 'scroll' or 'unfold' would be irresistable to publishers and marketers.
Being able to load PDFs into SWFs would be especially sweet. Not sure if that's one of the future offerings, but it seems like an obvious thing. (Otherwise, being able to convert PDF to Flash with a simple import or export command).
Spot on. Looking forward to this.
Posted by: Brennan Young at March 8, 2008 08:07 AM