*** From the Archives ***
This article is from April 5, 2011, and is no longer current.
InDesign Technology Preview & Watch This Date
There has been a lot of buzz recently about a new version of the Adobe Creative Suite coming. David posted about this a couple weeks ago.
Technology Sneak Videos
Today, some new Technology Previews have been posted at the Adobe TV site, including one which is for InDesign. Colin Fleming demos a new Overlay Creator panel for InDesign. It’s focused on creating interactive content for the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. This suite, in semi-public beta at Adobe Labs allows creation of digital publications for tablet devices. Colin demos the creation of a couple kinds of interactivity, and shows it on an Apple iPad and a Motorola Zoom.
But at the end of the video, an intriguing screen is displayed which suggests a date to pay attention to.
April 11
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Yes, pretty neat… But…
I don’t mean to sound negative in any way, but I pretty much expected Adobe to come up with tools specifically geared towards touch-based devices. In fact, the interactive ID Magazine issue in the Appstore has shown us a glimpse of the road ahead…
I reallllllly hope Adobe will not only address cool new features for CS5.5 or CS6, but also how their pricing model influences the cost of publishing – in particular their monthly fees, which may be reasonable for large publishers, but won’t do anything for free-lancers or in-house-publishers. I hope they’ll present some alternatives!
I would also like to see them address the fact that you cannot take full advantage of today’s capabilities of the PDF format on an iPad (e.g. forms – and we won’t even mention the other f-word here). I couldn’t care less about all the politics going on behind stage, but the fact that third party software (e.g. PDFExpert) unlocks a large part of PDF features and embedded scripts seems to indicate to me that this is not a fundamental compatibility issue between a PDF file and iOS (EXCEPT, of course, Flash!).
Those are just two basic issues that – in my eyes – ought to be fixed alongside any additional cool new technologies and even more InDesign panels that most of us are clamoring for. And I will spare you the numerous other improvement and feature requests submitted by a large part of the community that have yet to make it into a working version of ID.
Oliver
InDesign desperately needs improvement on EPUB export. With all the hype, let’s hope Adobe doesn’t disappoint.
I really wish Adobe didn’t build every application and their brother in Flash and AIR nowadays. That panel uses a custom interface, that looks different, and if the existing Flash UIs are any indication, behaves differently than the native widgets. The XMP file info dialog (alongside Photomerge in Photoshop, which was perfectly good until it was flashified for no apparent reason in CS5) is another victim of that trend ? half the standard OS text editing keyboard shortcuts don’t work, text drag and drop doesn’t work properly, it looks out of place, it is poorly designed (navigating those tabs requires excessive scrolling) and there is a noticeable lag even on the fastest computer when interacting with it.
No matter how good the tools they build may be, usability still matters, and I hope that will be more of a priority for Adobe in the future. I mean, I’d even gladly be limited to outputting regular interactive PDF for tablet devices if they added drag-and-drop column/row reordering for tables.
Overlay creator panel has been part of the Digital Publishing Suite for months – nothing new.
@Richard, you’ll see epub 3.0 support.
Looking forward to seeing the direct export to app format soon!
Richard, with all due respect, a variant:
InDesign desperately needs improvement on proper book support. With all the current EPUB hype, let?s hope Adobe doesn?t disappoint.
Peter took all the words about flash panels out of my mouth. It is very noticeable the difference between the panels created in Flash vs the native C++ panels. To take a line from Steve Jobs the “user experience” is not the same.
Cool. That date will be significant, based on the buzz going around.
And it will be called CS 5.5. Johnny lets it slip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUiaOzweco0
@Jongware
I completely agree that basic publishing features need to be added to indesign that have been neglected for a long long time.
Only today I was adding new rows and columns to tables, and wondered how hard would it be to include a “Height” or “Width” for the row or column, respectively.
Things like footnotes spanning columns. And about 30 other features I posted on the Adobe forums a few months ago.
Fingers crossed!
The overlay panel thing is almost the least of the new InDesign functionality, in my view, but I agree there’s still a long way to go for paper publishing. (Should that be “real”? “classic”? “regular”? — we’re going to need a term for it, just as we now have to say “land line” to talk about a real/classic/legacy/regular telephone.)