Creation of ipad magazine

[dedalus]

Hi there,

What program/app would you choose in order to create an ipad magazine? It would be a literary magazine with lots of interviews/photos/short stories/videos/music content.

Thanks for any advice you may have.

Manuel

 

[primalman]

I use the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite toolkit.

 

[dedalus]

Thanks primalman,

how hard is it to learn to use properly?

 

[primalman]

The actual use of the DPS tools is pretty easy, normal InDesign use paradigm, using the Folio Overlays and Folio Builder panels to manage the assets, in addition to a few others. The complexity arrises when you move to distribution, for single folio and multi-folio viewers. And expenses. You also can look into things like Prss [web-based] and Mag+ [InDesign plug-in] to see if those suit your needs and budget.

 

[lucidmedia]

Look at DPS and Mag+, but keep in mind that both are quite expensive if you want to get your publication in front of people...

Both of these systems "hack" an indesign file... placing elements on certain layers give them different properties. I am not a huge fan of the idea overall, as indesign is not a great tool to create these types of interactive experiences IMO.

Also, keep in mind that the compiling process involves taking all the content in indesign and making it all into static, non-searchable graphics! Think Microsoft encarta from back in the day... The resulting files are huge... It is hard to convince users to download a 4gb magazine.

Consider also iBooks author. It is terribly documented, but with some work you can make a very custom template. it supports a lot of widgets and uses a similar layout engine to keynote. Files are also huge however.

We did a ton of research on this and wound up deciding that developing a dynamic and responsive website with lots of multi-touch and swipe support was a far more cost effective option...

 

[dedalus]

Thanks a lot lucidmedia,

i'm interested in understanding more what you mean in your last paragraph. I'm trying to catch up but I'm a total ignoramus on this subject.

Manuel