Trying to evaluate the different ways to publish interactive content to the iPad is, I imagine, a bit like speed dating and you barely have time to assess one method’s better points and its downfalls before you’re being told it’s time to move on in your (vain) attempt to get round the full room. The trouble is, in almost Kafkaesque style, just as soon you begin to feel confident you’re going to get round all the possibilities, you notice another one just sitting down at the end of the table and you realize you’re never going to reach the conclusion. Sooner or later, if you want to get something done, you’re going to have to decide to take a chance and stay where you are, or maybe you should go back four – or should that be five – places.

Though I’d mentioned PhoneGap in my last post, at that time it was only in the corner of my eye and I hadn’t sat down in front of this new arrival and pressed its buttons. I had seen a menu command in Dreamweaver CS5.5 which allowed you to export HTML content to PhoneGap, but an obvious downfall was the need to install the various devices’ SDKs on the local computer – and the iOS SDK is Mac-limited, which ruled out testing on my main computer. What intrigued me most was their completely cloud-based beta service, PhoneGapBuild, and then I saw the announcement that Adobe were buying the company (a bit like PhoneGapBuild subtly telling you it already had other admirers too).

Now I’ve tried it, it’s going to be hard to move on. Basically PhoneGapBuild allows you to upload HTML content and it returns an iOS app, and Android, webOS, Symbian, or BlackBerry. For iOS, you need have the $99 Apple developer subscription because you have to enter the developer certificate and device provisioning codes, but once you’ve figured out those steps it’s a simple matter of waiting a few minutes while the server bakes the app and then you click the link to download it to your iPad via iTunes. Your uploaded creation can be as primitively “Ugh World” as a single HTML file or a zipped set of HTML and other assets which can include all sorts of CSS and JavaScripting goodness. The pricing isn’t ridiculous either – $12 / month or $120 / year in addition to the Apple developer subscription it you want to target the iPad. In no time at all I was turning fancy Dreamweaver animations or Lightroom web galleries into apps running on the iPad.

So if you know your HTML / CSS / JavaScript, PhoneGapBuild is definitely worth trying and if you want to see what I’ve done you can contact me. For the more geekish, there’s even an API and  – as if I’ve not enough buzzing round my head – I’m already thinking of ways to integrate it with a Lightroom plug-in or web gallery…..

This is the app I’ve been creating in InDesign. It’s a portfolio of pictures with tutorial content including interactive elements like pop out images, panning and zooming, and video (and some stuff where frankly I’m just showing off).

Contact me if you’re interested in seeing the actual thing – it may be a service I roll out.

Over the past couple of weeks since my previous post, I’ve been putting a lot of time into reading everything I can find on publishing to the iPad, particularly from InDesign, so I was fascinated by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch’s series of announcements during the Max conference keynote yesterday.

It wasn’t a complete surprise that Adobe have opened up the InDesign-AppStore route to individual users. Since Creative Suite 5.5 – which has really wowed me over the last two weeks – you’ve been able to create an interactive book or magazine in InDesign and use its Folio Builder panel to upload pages to Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite web site, which then bakes your content and publishes an app a range of supported app stores, including Apple’s. Unfortunately, this service was only available as a $6000 annual subscription. I imagine Adobe urgently needed to get a corporate solution up and running and weren’t ready for the masses, and certainly that level of fees priced out individuals wanting to use a rather-elegant workflow. So the new Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition is a one-off payment of $395 per app. According to the announcement:

The Single Edition offering truly democratizes publishing – it allows customers to publish a single, custom iPad app for a one-time payment of US$395. Bottom line- it’s affordable.

OK, it is hype, and “democratizes publishing” may be true if you define democracy rather like the ancient Greeks and exclude most people who aren’t geeks. At first I thought this was an easy win – “only” double the price of Aquafadas but with a workflow I’ve been very happily testing. Bob Levine at InDesign Secrets highlights some of the difficulties: and the first two seem particularly

• This is a one-off product. No in-app purchases and no subscriptions.
• The app cannot be updated. Just like a printed piece, if it needs updating you pay.
• …DPS SE is iPad only at this time. Playbook and Android will roll out in 2012.
• North America only to start…. globally throughout 2012.

The second point struck me as the most troublesome. Who hasn’t ever finished a piece of work, checked it over, twice or more, and then released it – only to identify minor typos or stupid errors? A friend recently told me 5 minutes after sending a wedding slideshow DVD he’d realised he’d misspelt the bride’s maiden name on the title screen. It happens all the time, because it is so hard to audit one’s own work, and part of the attraction of digital publishing is the ability to push out updates or minor fixes. One might also question whether the pricing is really that attractive. If you’re using the route to create a promotional app for art directors or other potential customers, then $395 isn’t too bad – assuming you have/know InDesign and don’t need to hire someone to create your masterpiece. And it’s not too bad if you’re selling the book. Say $5 a copy through the App Store and you’re talking 113 copies before you break even (after Apple gouge 30% of the revenue). But given my reservations about getting it right first time, how good a deal is it?

So Single Edition could still amount to a substantial barrier to publishing, especially if you can choose to create an app in Flash, or even XCode. On the other hand, Adobe are giving you a helping hand – your first published Single Edition app will be free.

The other announcement that really caught my eye was that Adobe are buying the company that makes PhoneGap. I’d never heard of them until a week or two ago, but I’ve been pursuing parallel routes to iPad publishing and noticed PhoneGap in Packaging web applications as mobile apps using Dreamweaver CS5.5. That method requires a local installation of the iOS toolkit so is Mac-limited, but it led me to their PhoneGap Build which seems to get round that problem by baking the app in the cloud. I don’t know how good it is, but my InDesign-DPS app makes extensive use of HTML for its interactivity.

And there was something else that was wonderful. They showed Photoshop Touch and how this app supports layers and how these were shown in 3D when they angled the tablet. Something to come in the desktop version (without tilting your monitor!)

The stonkingly-big (300 million pixels a second) screen was pretty impressive too!

Over the past week or so I’ve been playing around with ways to publish to the iPad and potentially to other mobile devices. I’m not terribly impressed by eBooks and what interests me is creating books in app form – bookApps^TM which could be marketed through Apple’s AppStore. Check out William Neill’s Yosemite app for an inspiring example.

One interesting route I mentioned a few weeks ago is Aquafadas, which publishes to an app via their InDesign plug-in. While a downside is that it is limited to the Mac, the pricing isn’t ridiculous – $150 for a single publication – making it possible to test the water. They also offer apps more geared to repeat publications and this has been used by Kelby Media to produce their Light It magazine app, for example. While I didn’t find Light It’s content of great interest to me, was turned off by its written style, and think there’s not enough separation between ads and content, where it really succeeds for me is in keeping the navigation simple (see this interview). You can only scroll through it horizontally, and I think that has a couple of effects. Perhaps the obvious one is that you always know where you are, but going beyond navigation is how it provides a good sense of what you’ve already read – and of what what you haven’t yet seen. I contrast that with the new British Journal of Photography app (done via Mag+) where there’s both horizontal and vertical scrolling and you’re never sure that you haven’t missed something. This app had much more interesting content – though an article of Anton Corbijn and mention of Joy Division gave it an unfair advantage – but I found it cluttered and at times infuriating. Too often I would swipe the screen with my fingers and have to wait a second or two for the page to scroll, and the delays were so long that I kept thinking  I hadn’t swiped properly.

I’ve also been keeping my eye on using Flash to create my own bookApps. After all, I put a lot of time into learning Flash and ActionScript – just before Steve Jobs decided he couldn’t/wouldn’t allow it on the iPad – and I’d quite like to build on that knowledge rather than learn ObjectiveC from the ground up. Flash also offers the opportunity to target other tablets, if any become widespread enough to matter. I think it’s hard to argue with this Economist article‘s view that there isn’t really an alternative to the iPad, but the article does point to the possibility that Amazon can build on their existing content delivery business and make the beefed-up Kindle a worthy competitor. I’d like to keep my options open, so last week I downloaded the Flash CS5.5 trial and had a crack at producing an AIR for iOS app, drawing heavily on Lee Brimelow’s tutorials. A couple of hours later and “Ugh World” was running on my iPad, and the next day it had crawled out of the swamp and was standing on all four legs with pictures and video. Basically, what I could do greatly exceeded what my expectations and proved the concept well enough to justify upgrading to Design Premium CS5.5.

Since then I’ve been digging around Adobe’s proposed workflows. This is a good overview of Adobe’s digital publishing workflow, and I’d also recommend Terry White’s recent InDesign podcasts on publishing via FolioBuilder to the iPad. Once you’ve got Adobe’s Content Viewer app, you can share multiple “folios” for free (this is new -  until last month you could only publish one for free). The trouble is, you can only sell these folios by subscribing to the Digital Publishing Suite and the pricing model is prohibitive for the small guy. My hunch is that sooner or later they’ll drop those prices….

LR-iTunes is a simple plug-in I wrote (hacked) to help synchronize pictures from Lightroom via iTunes to my iPad.

Basically it is a dumbed down version of the Hard Drive Publishing Service and is more suited for the requirements of iTunes. So I tried to make it look the part which is no big deal, just an icon or two,  and instead of creating “collections” or “published collections” you create “albums”. Also it won’t allow you to create sets because iTunes would ignore them and just lump all the pictures into a single big album.

Once you’ve published to a folder, you use iTunes as normal to sync to the iPhone, iPad or AppleTV.

One little extra is a menu command in File > Plug-in Extras > Copy Albums to another Lr-iTunes service. This makes it easier to set up separate services for each iOS device and it will copy dumb albums from one to another (in fact, it will do a little more than that). It won’t copy smart albums because of an annoying omission in Lightroom’s automation interface, so you’d have to use the export/import smart album route.

I wrote (hacked) the plug-in mainly more to teach myself how to use Publish services and it is offered as a freebie – without support.

I just came across this Russell Brown video Exporting Adobe Lightroom 3 PDF Portfolios to an Apple iPad.

No doubt I wasn’t too interested when it first came out, and I’ve already exported PDF slideshows to the iPad enough times not to find it very interesting this time around – other than 1030 by 752 pixels. So that’s the size you need to choose!