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Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite to Support Newsstand for iOS 5

emulator said:
When you/me/she/he make a statement, it's your/my/her/his personal opinion. If I say that iOS has more useless than useful apps, do I also have to say every time "in my personal view" to make it obvious?
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How am I/he/she/it/them/we supposed to know the difference when someone says something is useless for him/her or for him/her/me/us/them? Perhaps if the person/thing had phrased it differently, their intent would have been known better. Useless means "without useful qualities; of no practical good: a useless person; a useless gadget." It seems to me that Contacts is a useful app, but you may not like it. I don't think it can be called useless in any way shape or form.

The problem is that when people use words incorrectly, it causes unneeded confusion.
 
So I did a test file using an account on acrobat.com I made just for this exercise.

You can totally zoom text (looks like roughly a 2 to 3 times zoom) and the text looks great, but ONLY if you set the article images as PDF instead of JPG.

The file size is roughly 33k (see screen cap) for a page full of text with an interactive section of text you can pan and zoom over. The jpg in comparison clocked in around 70k, and you can't zoom it. If the New Yorker took this approach, they could probably (even with the images added back in) shave at least half of their magazine size.
 

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Well, here's an addendum, you can only use the PDF option when there's no interactivity on the page. Boo hiss. I don't use the New Yorker app, so I've no clue on how much interactivity is in each article. Even with the interactivity on this page it's only 150k. You could have a 100 page magazine and it'd only be 15 megs. Let's be generous and throw a bunch of images and some clips, I still don't get how people think they need 500 megs for a magazine. I think the art of optimization must be lost on some folk.

For anyone else who wants to see the test and how the pdf text looks when zoomed you can do the following:

Download the Adobe content viewer (just search for that name) from the app store (works on Andriod or iPad)

Use the following log-in credentials:

username: macrumorsdpsthread@gmail.com
password: spaceballs

I made the account just for this test so feel free to trash the account, I won't care. :)
 
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chirpie said:
Sorry, I think this is a bad example, because I expect this to be a break even or net loss prospect. It certainly won't rescue them from their current woes anyway.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology...all-working-for-ya-no-we-didnt-think-so/11936

I'm certainly not implying Adobe's solution is perfect or even as good as the examples you give. What I am saying is it's a perfectly reasonable solution for small to medium sized businesses.
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I'm not arguing that mom and pop shops are the ones that need to be hiring programmers (and I think Apple has dropped the ball by not producing their own newspaper/ magazine creation tools (they do have eBook creation tools: Pages exports to ePub -- I've tested, it works.)) And I agree that The Times burned a massive pile of cash for very meager results.

But again, Conde Nast is not small or medium. They are probably the largest magazine publisher in the business. They darn well should be hiring their own programmers.

BTW, thanks for taking the time to investigate DSP's capabilities and sharing with us!
 
Ted13 said:
But again, Conde Nast is not small or medium. They are probably the largest magazine publisher in the business. They darn well should be hiring their own programmers.
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I can't argue that. It's true enough. :)

BTW, thanks for taking the time to investigate DSP's capabilities and sharing with us!
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It was fun. Thanks!
 
adobe is being very smart, focusing on making useful apps, expanding just like Apple and HP are doing.

I respect big companies that do great things, rather then big companies that just plain piss me off. For Technology!
 
Sodner said:
They should activate Newsstand now. Let that be tested as part of the beta.
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It is being tested now as part of beta - at least if you are the developer. I am working on a newsstand capable app and can test it fine. I'm sure you meant the general public, but just wanted to put that out there.
 
blipmusic said:
Does this mean I could hypothetically buy a mag sub on Zinio and have it show up in Newsstand? [EDIT: Probably not, as it seems the subscriptions would come from the App Store, directly from the publishers...correct?]

Would be nice to have a desktop version of Newsstand for OS X as well, rather than the AIR app Zinio uses. [EDIT 2: I guess, Newsstand is not even a reader nor do we currently have magazine subs on the Mac App Store so, er, scratch that as well...? Oh well back to Zinio then.]
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I'm guessing if you have subscriptions through Zino, you will not be able to convert them via newsstand. At the very least, it would require Zino to create an app that is newsstand aware, however I think Apple's newsstand was created in part to fill what they thought was a better way than Zino.

You have to understand, with newsstand, there is more than just background downloading there is also custom "app" icons. Your "apps" icon changes like the front page of a newspaper or magazine changes with each new issue. There is also the background downloading and push notifications.

As to the desktop version, while I don't know what Apple will do, from what I have seen with the iOS version and now Lion I think a desktop version of both newsstand and iBooks is in the near future.
 
Using the Adobe DTP solution, you can save pages in a PDF format (retaining crisp text, etc.) but you cannot incorporate any interactive elements on the page. If you want to design using interactive elements, the pages in your doc are saved out as Jpegs. My experience so far is that the text in Jpeg docs are acceptable, and any minor pixelation is not likely perceived by the general viewing public. I've demoed a mock magazine to a few of my clients and none of them have mentioned the text being unreadable in any way.

Stability of Adobe's Content Reader app is somewhat of a problem. There are times when the app cannot connect to Adobe's servers to download the most current version of a magazine.

But again, Adobe's pricing structure is going to be the downfall for small companies like mine that produce inter-company newsletters/magazines.
 
marcusj0015 said:
Why is iBooks and Newsstand separate apps??????
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Intuitiveness I suppose. To a less savvy user "iBooks" might not sound like to first place to look for magazines.

You'll notice that they also changed "iPod" to "Music" on the iPhone and iPad.
 
Mag+ is an incredible alternative to Adobe's tablet publishing suite. Both large and small publishers have used the Mag+ inDesign toolset. It is very cost effective and also provides many options that Adobe does not.
 
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