Adobe Shows Flash and InDesign Technology Preview
February 26th, 2008Michael Ninness, Adobe’s Senior Product Manager of InDesign, opened The InDesign Conference in Miami today with a demo of some technology that Adobe is working on. He made it very clear that this was not necessarily going to be in any future version of InDesign, but that they’re considering it and wanted to get the audience’s feedback on it. That said, the demo did run inside an application that was labeled “InDesign CS4.” That doesn’t mean anything, but it was titillating, if nothing else. 
The technology preview followed a stream of examples of magazines that were created using InDesign and painstakingly converted to Flash by designers and developers around the world. His theme was “wouldn’t it be nice if we could make these people’s lives easier.” He then switched to InDesign, opened a simple layout, created a regular frame, and then opened a Buttons panel that appeared to combine CS3’s Behaviors dialog box and the States panel.
He then exported his layout (using File > Export) as a Flash (SWF) file that included basic interactivity. It was simple, elegant, and obviously anyone could do it. David Stephens, an software engineer on the InDesign team who apparently wrote much of this code, was pointed out by Senior Evangelist Tim Cole, who shared the stage with Ninness. The audience was obviously appreciating the demo, applauding for Stephens’ work.
Ninness then showed a Page Transitions dialog box (found in the Pages panel) that let the user specify slides, dissolves, and other cool transitions. One of the items was labeled “SWF Only,” which let me to wonder if these transitions would also work in other export formats. (I have long wanted the ability to choose page transitions in exported PDF files.)
Once again, he exported the file as SWF — this time pointing out some of the export options, including the option to scale the file to any size (such as 1024 x 768) and checkboxes for “Include Transitions” and “Include Keyboard Shortcuts” (which writes the appropriate code so that people can press arrow keys to navigate the slideshow he was creating). Flash played the transitions beautifully.
Joking about the nature of the demo, Tim leaned over and glibly noted, “Yeah, it’d be great if you could actually do that.”
Ninness then showed a sample file from InDesign Magazine and exported it in a file format that he could open in something labeled “Flash CS4″ (but again, no promises!). There were a number of options, including a pop-up menu that read, “InDesign Text to Flash Text.” When exported, each page of the InDesign file had been converted to a movie clip and appeared as a frame in the Flash document.
Ninness pointed out that this was a great first step, but then to add real interactivity (animations, and so on), he had handed the Flash file off to a developer (Chris Converse) who made the magic… and magic it seemed to be. I guess I’m pretty easily amused, but seeing the final SWF, with fancy transitions from page to page, objects animating on each page, and buttons for zooming in on areas was just totally cool.
It was a short and sweet demo, but clearly Adobe has a lot up its sleeve. I love the idea of Flash export. Stay tuned, and we’ll let you know as we learn more over time.
Hey David, many thanks for keeping us all up to date. It all sounds very promising and awesome.
Thanks, David, a very interesting report (though I’m at present not a Flash guy), so please keep the tech-news coming!
Any news of when CS4 might be out? Too early to tell, I just hope Adobe are now back on their 18-month release cycle, which got twisted into a 24-month one for CS3, due to the mammoth job of updating your luddite Maccies to the Intel world. So that’s one more grudge I have against you Maccies.
David, one correction. I did not credit the greatly talented Dave Stephens with this code…and for good reason…he didn’t write it. I credited Dave for other good work. This code was written by a Mr Greg Not-Attending-This-Conference. (not his real last name)
> just hope Adobe are now back on their 18-month release cycle, which got twisted into a 24-month one for CS3,
Please, give us some time to save money for all this updates… I’m happy with 24 months. Geez!
In all fairness, Klaus, they were also working on merging MM products in and adding Vista compatibility.
The latter seems to be a bit more of a success from my standpoint, though it looks like Apple is more to blame than Adobe for the problems.
Back on topic….this looks like some really exciting stuff…maybe I’ll finally be forced to learn Flash.
Wa, no one’s holding a gun to your head regarding purchasing upgrades. So you’re quite free to wait 6 months longer than upgrade-impatient moi. But that’s no reason why your snail’s pace of adoption should be allowed to slow me down!
OK, Bob, so they added MM products. Except I was looking forward to getting a Dreamweaver with the excellent new Adobe CS3 UI — but they gave us an only slightly updated DW with the old, somewhat-annoying MM UI, which is totally out of place in the CS3 suite, and gives me a minor scare whenever I boot DW.
No! Adobe should be working on improving their export to HTML/CSS/Javascript. Flash is nonaccessible, cannot be properly bookmarked or linked to, and most of all—it’s proprietary.
Sounds like Quark Interactive Designer to me… interesting that Adobe copies that concept.
Didn’t Adobe show Photoshop CS3 around half a year before it shipped?
So that would mean that CS4 ships in late summer this year.
I woudl recommend to tell your friends to not buy CS3 anymore and wait for CS4 then.
InDesign to Flash? So lets just forget about any decent export to HTML and right to Flash. Guess it was too hard.
I never realized that people were doing this sort of thing.Why not just use Illustrator and reduce the pain? Remind me of old-school designers who would layout a website in Quark and then hand it off - instead of using Photoshop.
Greg, the XHTML/Dreamweaver export gives you flawless HTML export from InDesign. Right now. Yes, in CS3.
I don’t see this is a means of making a web site out of InDesign (which is a horrible idea anyway [as are all-Flash websites, but I digress]), but as a way of publishing documents normally meant for print on the web. Books become ebooks, magazines become e-zines, etc. Think embedded inline PDFs that don’t suck quite as much.
This could have really great implications for my workflow here, since the inability to get things in and out of Flash is currently a major impediment to supporting layouts within a Flash gaming environment.
Brian and Clint, your observations are spot on. The reason for the technology would be to streamline what is now a convoluted and painful process to do a design in InDesign, and then deliver it as an e-zine or in some other, Flash-based digital environment. It’s not to build web sites per se. The XHTML export is intended to meet the need to get content out of InDesign and in to Dreamweaver or GoLive.
This sounds like a great (potential) feature! I don’t suppose anyone has video of this?
As it turns out, we did take some great footage of it. I’m trying to figure out how to get this on to youtube…
Okay, here’s the videos… pretty cool stuff. Here’s the first half; here’s the second half.
Pretty cool, indeed. Let’s hope this “future technology” finds its way into the present real soon.
You can read a great article with some more background on the InDesign/Flash thing at creativepro.com.
just wondering why this is so exciting, Quark does this with XPress now and has been for the last year, html export from XPress has been far better than ID for the last 4 years. When will Adobe innovate instead of copy. We need innovation in software and Adobe is severally lacking in this area for the past few years. As a industry we now need to watch Quark and look for innovation that will change the way we create content and publish
I gotta say, I don’t put the smartest posts out.. but, anyways from my best and solidly best opinion I would imagine it would be as early as late Oct- Mid Nov.