Publishing with Silicon

Here at MAX for the 5th year in a row – I didn’t go to these until Adobe bought Macromedia and it has been very interesting to see the changes over the past 5 years.

Keynote – Kevin Lynch started in with discussion technology trends, then moved into presentation of the Digital Publishing features. Wired magazine was presented, and really didn’t show much different than what we’ve seen already. They seem to have reacted to some of the initial bashing. They showed dynamic text wrapping in HTML, identical to SVG text wrapping demos from 10 years ago. Not exactly thrilling, though they do say they are contributing to WebKit. He presented the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, starting from InDesign, collaboratively produced and distributed, and of course they want to use Omniture to analyze the results. It is quite a stretch to think they will do the full-cycle at all as well as they have built the low-level tools.

Kevin spoke of video… quite an awesome amount of video going out in Flash, but unlike last year they are not showing the trend towards ubiquity, but rather “most video on the web is still shown in Flash.” Flash 10.1 was very quickly adopted, apparently, yet we know where it did not show up. Internet television keeps advancing, and Flash does have quite a head start there: the streaming is really impressive. AIR for TV is out; first launch partner is Samsung. Marc Goldberg of Epix spoke of multi-screen, saying their subscribers watch on a number of different screens: the demo broke, however.

Flash Media Server is working on on-the-fly encoding. Wowza seems to have made some real inroads, based on discussion with some attendees. P2P-assisted video looks kind of cool.

Kevin showed a number of small apps built targeting the tablet computing environment… it would appear they are rewriting things to be more lightweight. He demo’d a table device / PC wireless app, where the iPad served as a palette for a user in Photoshop.

Adobe MAX 2010 - Tablet as artist palette connected to desktop via wireless

He spoke of the enterprise… the impact of multi-screen, as well as LiveCycle. He mentioned the Day Software acquisition, which we have been watching with eager anticipation at Silicon Publishing, and brought their CTO David Nüscheler to present.

David Nüscheler from Day spoke of the need for discrete control of how things work across devices: he explained that the communications are truly different, it is not as trivial as spewing forth variants of the same thing entirely, but there is a true need to have some separate content specifically targeted. David demo’d CQ5, showing editing of HTML and mobile content. He did not dwell on the DAM, which has been our primary interest in Day. We are in the midst of a very exciting integration with the Day DAM, and so far we have been extremely impressed with the DAM aspects of Day. Adobe has done several acquisitions really well, and even though it’s the LiveCycle group that they are subsumed into, we are optimistic they will take over appropriate leadership roles. Wouldn’t it be cool if we can connect the rendition power of Adobe to structured information in LiveCycle? We have witnessed a long and pathetic history of the Acrobat monopoly being squandered on silo-based random junk (Central Output Pro? Graphics Server? Document Server? Forms with dirt-crude formatting?…) for rendition, yet there is good security and DRM in LiveCycle, hopefully the Day team will gut it and connect appropriately to the rendition side of Adobe (Flash, After Effects, InDesign desktop and Server, and above all… Scene7).

Day does introduce a real philosophical paradox. After the keynote, they presented content that had probably mainly been presented before, starting with a 45-minute argument for Open Source. LiveCycle has traditionally been the precise opposite of Open Source, and just the day before at the leadership summit we had heard that the “open source” Flex project had approximately 0 contributions from anybody but Adobe: will Day change this? It will be interesting. It was sort of strange to hear conway’s law cited and consider what that would mean as the organization is not the Apache Foundation any more, it is Adobe. We will see some interesting software!

Kevin demo’d medical imaging technology. Flex really does create powerful front ends for enterprise apps. Flex 4.5 beta is out, I am not sure after the year of Flex 4 beta lifestyle how deeply we will want to dive in. Back then we really needed the TLF badly, so it was probably worth the rush, I think with future Flex betas we can build a bit less production code on top of it.

Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM, came on and showed the Blackberry Playbook. Adobe and RIM have been working together with Flash/AIR; fairly obvious that Apple motivates them. “Not trying to dumb down the internet for a mobile device” – NICE stab at Apple. That was, as the 2 of you who read this blog know, my big reaction to the iPad.

Kevin showed some cool games, rendition gets faster over time with more use of the GPU, and AIR is evolving. AIR for Android looks good, Apple has some good competition, hopefully. Deploying from Flash to iPhone OS is once again possible, too.

Social gaming has always been one of Kevin’s interests: he showed the work idol worship, a nice-looking virtual reality game that uses old school animation techniques coupled with slightly newer technologies. He showed some very cool GPU-accelerated 3D capabilities of other games. Flash is really getting nice: the virtual reality driving demo was compelling. With the next Flash 3D, code named Molehill, the immersive 3D graphics should be very good for games and general 3D imaging.

Chrysty Wyatt from Motorola came on to speak of Android and the request of Motorola to put Flash on mobile devices – “anyone who fails to put Flash on a mobile device is not giving you the Internet.” And they are not above bribing us – all attendees at MAX are getting a Droid 2.

..Should be a revolution for web-to-print applications. I would imagine that Facebook will further consolidate its control over the Social Media space. A bit scary that such critical mass factors leave MySpace, Friendster, etc. fairly dead in the water…. people want to go to where their friends are. And it appears more and more digital assets will reside in Facebook as well. I imagine that applications like fidipidi will get more popular as the quality of output from Facebook to print gets better.

I saw the feature yesterday, but it seems to have been turned off today. Maybe this has caught on? Today, I uploaded a 1936 × 2592 image, and as usual Facebook reduced it to 538 × 720.

Max picture with resolution reduced by Facebook upload

Hardly conducive to high quality print, though I have been impressed that even with resolution along those lines, the cards from fidipidi have looked pretty great.

As soon as Facebook turns this feature back on, I will make a high resolution card using fidipidi and report the results.

DITA will take over the world… or maybe more like lay under it, as XML does currently.

From my perspective, DITA (or a good part of DITA – there is also the tech doc focus) is the next step in core SGML/XML. IBM started SGML itself, and later had a fair amount to do with XML: now the same sort of people are working on DITA, making XML safe for the world.

DITA extends SGML constructs such as entities with constructs such as conrefs. Everyone loves the idea of re-use of content, but XML 1.0 is a bit too flexible in this regard. It doesn’t say much about *how* you re-use, associate, and aggregate content, thus tools will do the same thing different ways, or won’t support re-use well at all. DITA fixes this, then immediately (concurrently) applies it to Tech Doc.

DITA is based on the practical experience of some IBM tech doc teams and while their goals and requirements were specific to tech doc, many of the core constructs are not.

Similar to XML itself, which is a meta-language (or language for creating languages), DITA has a powerful specialization methodology, that allows for completely custom document structures, yet a backwards compatibility with the core DITA constructs. If your <eBookPara> tag is read by a DITA rendition tool that only knows the <p> of DITA, you will at least get things rendered, though perhaps not in the special “eBook” way that you prefer. At least the tools don’t break.

It is somewhat confusing that the drivers for DITA remain squarely in the Tech Doc space, yet the solution it provides is often fairly universal. Maybe what DITA needs to do is split into the tech-doc specific DITA and the generic DITA, the way XSL split into XSLT and XSL-FO.

What is the world coming to? Never thought I’d see IE supporting SVG. We lobbied so hard 9 years ago, 8 years ago, and 7 years ago, until it felt like we were getting nowhere.

I remember Microsoft tried to hire me in 2002, having found me on the… SVG developers list. Now that was strange, what on earth were they doing stalking us XML geeks?

In a year or so, it became clear; XAML was highly derived from SVG, and would form the basis of WPF and Silverlight later. Unable to embrace a standard, MS had decided to copy standards activity into their own proprietary technology.

The poor SVG black sheep was even abandoned by Adobe itself when they eyed Macromedia/Flash, and enjoyed almost ZERO serious support over a few years, unless you count intensive emulation with XAML and later FXG, or the tireless efforts of a few diehards in places like the Mozilla project and Opera that kept SVG alive.

Fast forward 7 years, and we find Microsoft in the same boat with Apple, falling further behind Adobe’s Flash on the RIA front, with Silverlight piling up on the junkheap of obscurity along with Quicktime. With both proprietary efforts dead in the water, SVG is suddenly appealing to these would-be monopolies, and we find a bizarre rally behind a 10-year-old standard.

Why did they even bother to throw SVG into the mix with HTML5? Certainly the Canvas functionality can accomplish most or all of the core Flash capability that everyone (other than Adobe) wants. SVG and Canvas seem to have complimentary performance depending on what you’re doing. Still, who wants to learn how to do everything two different ways? Perhaps those railroading HTML5 through “spec” processes realize they won’t catch everything with the canvas approach, but more likely, they realize that this 2010 form of “standard” with Apple/Google pushing their rush “standard” out as Microsoft tails along, can have a better chance of flying with some stapled-on integrity from a bygone era.

It is still great to see, there is something really nice about the simplicity of core SVG, and it is fully ironic that its enemies have ended up having to support it despite their traditional opposition to standards. Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft have the same monopolistic agendas, yet are forced to co-exist, and let flowers like SVG grow through the cracks.

Today Steve Jobs called Adobe “Lazy.”

Flash has dramatically improved since Adobe bought Macromedia. Papervision 3D is a 3D engine that runs on Actionscript, this sort of capability was unheard of back when Macromedia ran Flash. 

Flash is spreading all over the place: set top boxes, TVs, phones, everywhere except the iPhone. It is ubiquitous for ads and video on the web. No wonder Steve is jealous. What is the install base of Quicktime?

Flash runs fine on every other phone. Is the iPhone buggy? no, it is intentionally dumbed down in the interest of rabid monopolistic tendencies of one eccentric genius.

Steve should remember that Apple would have died save for its use as a graphics platform running Adobe technology for a long stretch of time.

The iPhone will be a better device when it supports Flash.

As much as he has done for the company and the world, Steve Jobs really has conquered everything that needed conquering; the world needs a little less conquering and fewer dumbed-down, closed-source, “no VM allowed” systems like the iPhone and iPad.

With the iPad we witness the first case in history of computing where the limitations of a small device float upwards into a bigger device, instead of the opposite (remember when Moore’s law was a good thing?): who is lazy?

I was on the phone with a prospective client today, who shall remain nameless and unidentifiable. This could be any company, as they face the essential predicament of anyone trying to get the same content to go to both web and print effectively.

On the one hand, there is so much commonality and re-use of their content across the web and print media, it is absurd to have two entirely different workflows. On the other hand, the tools that lend themselves to a real multi-channel workflow, such as real XML content management, take extreme effort and time to implement and often have expensive associated software. Even after that effort, authors or content sources may not fit in with the required content process at all. Beyond that, moving content over from an unstructured to a structured format can be really difficult.

Inevitably, XML demonstrations make business users underestimate the challenge. “If you show us something, show us with our content!,” he said; evidently they were shown a rosy picture where perfectly marked up XML flowed easily out into web, print, braille, video, whatever. It is true; if you have rich semantic markup the publishing capabilities are amazing.

The challenge is getting that richly marked up content. It is hardly automatic. The extreme best case for authoring such content is the world of technical documentation, where the authors are typically really technical, and highly-evolved schemas/toolchains like DITA give them guidance on how to structure content. But at the other extreme, with writers who are non-technical, it is hard to get them to work with tools that are too constraining, or to get them to follow rigorous guidelines. No pain, no gain:  without the rich markup, publishing becomes more of a channel-by-channel basis.

I believe over time things will get easier, with standards like DITA, greater support for XML authoring in tools, and better example workflows for organizations smaller than the Department of Defense. But the pace of such improvement is slow.

We have built solutions using InDesign Server since it came out, and before that we were building solutions based on InDesign desktop for 5 years. So we know the XMPie space pretty well.

XMPie is a really well-built program, that to me has three main benefits:

1. It lets you easily define a data source for variable content (using uPlan) and reference that data source directly in InDesign (via uCreate)
2. It manages XMPie jobs (via the uProduce server), with functionality exposed as Web Services
3. It optimizes print output, producing VPS (which has been known to work), PPML, “VIPP” (which is known not to work; it is not VIPP but a VIPP wrapper around PostScript), etc.

XMPie is salvation for the designer at a mail house: they can bypass Programming entirely and set up their own “campaign” based on new InDesign/data input from a client.

Yet these days, we never meet such a designer. We meet enterprise clients, who consider themselves very special and do things a very special way. XMPie invariably meets their needs 40-80% of the way, but the other 20-60% can take a supreme effort. So we need to request extensibility from XMPie, and in many case fuse together an XMPie workflow with a very non-XMPie workflow. XMPie may be sick of my requests, but they have given us more and more extensibility over time.

InDesign Server has to its advantage complete flexibility, but if you use InDesign Server alone you have to build several features that are pre-existing with XMPie. It really depends on specific workflows/document types/staff whether XMPie is the right fit.

We worked with Adobe a bit on their Scene7 product, and I have to say that it is some of the most promising technology out there for Web to Print. There are two big gotchas that I hope are overcome soon:

1. The text that is possible with Flash 10 is not fully functional: this stands to improve once FXG 2.0 is available, the hope is that FXG 2.0 will be fully supported. As of now the text is more like FXG 1+, it isn’t quite robust enough for our typical clients.
2. The pricing model is crazy. I think they priced it so high that they would make sure not to get slammed with too many initial implementations. $50K/year as a base price with multiple forms of transaction/bandwidth costs on top of that is hardly a SaaS model. You either pay as you go or you pay up front, they can’t ask for both…

Also, it appears in their early concepts of how the app would be used, they imagined one would hit the server for the Flash renditions! I think the whole beauty of sharing the XML model between PDF and Flash is leveraging what the client can do…

Demonstration of the Scene7 web-to-print solution

Anyway, in all my years of working with great programmers, including many at Adobe, I have never seen a group as great as those working on Scene7 web to print. I am very optimistic about its future.

The fundamental beauty of the Scene7 model for web to print is that it uses the same XML to describe the web document and the print document. It also extends the XML used in Flash (FXG) to support requirements of print such as CMYK color. Tricky, as this would ideally not be done in a separate namespace, but would be part of the core FXG spec itself. In general it is awkward how the different groups at Adobe work together: they are all focused on their own short-term deliverables and can’t often reconcile or coordinate the overlapping parts of their efforts.

Which brings us to… InDesign Server. One might have guessed that Scene7 would use InDesign Server rather than build their own form of PDF generation totally independent, with a different text engine (common with Illustrator/Flash, not InDesign) and different XML model (FXG vs. IDML). Sadly, the InDesign project does represent the ultimate in text engines, the ultimate in document feature sets for long documents, etc., but there has not been a desire to use it from the Scene7 group. They didn’t find it much of a true server product, apparently, which is quite understandable. The “server” dimension of IDS is minimalist, it is essentially the rendition half of the desktop product with a few hooks and enough “build it yourself” aspects that solution providers like us have a fairly endless stream of opportunity.

So Scene7 will hopefully become a big part of our work next year, assuming the 2 issues above are handled, yet InDesign Server will remain, especially for longer documents and those cases where extending a desktop InDesign workflow to the server is easier when avoiding issues around reconciling text and layout engines. We don’t really mind two systems, but some day I’m sure we’ll hit a hybrid case where we use both, and in some long-term road map (CS7?) they should actually get reconciled.

Adobe product managers have managed to calm down my early complaints about non-reconciliation of these two engines. One pointed out the incredible backwards compatibility responsibilities of IDS: they can’t just start over… one tiny bug in one tiny dot release can screw up a million documents for a client, they are not as agile as a SaaS shop.

In terms of SaaS; as of now, Scene7 is almost only SaaS and IDS is almost only self-hosted. It is likely that both products will cross over the other direction. We can host IDS in an EC2 environment just fine, with great scalability, yet the licensing is not SaaS friendly. In similar fashion, Scene7 can install just fine as a self-hosted software, yet they only allow this in “special” situations and tend to push for SaaS at all costs.

I just set up a basic WordPress blog for Paris Tompkins. This took only a few minutes’ spare time, including the hosting, DNS, customization. She chose the theme herself; I just made the side look OK and added the vital “Add to Any” plugin.

I still barely know WordPress, but I have had almost no trouble with any aspect of it recently: I played around with various blogging software about 8 years ago, and it was nowhere near this easy. I have only had to do something with PHP within a WordPress site once, and probably because of the nature of the template.

I am an impatient person and I will never be content with the pace of publishing technology, but I have to say that when you look back to where the web was in 1996 and where it is today, it has generally gone the right direction. Well, that is after starting out with a fairly complete misinterpretation.

Proposal for the World Wide Web

The original concept was of course brilliant, and you should check out the proposal for the web if you haven’t already. Basically, the intent of the web was to facilitate two-way communication, but of course the mindset of a Television-soaked population at first thought of it more like a single-direction, one-to-many, broadcast medium. We only understand things in relation to what we’ve seen before, at least at first.

So the Web started out with much knee-jerk reproduction of the Television model, and only with the gradual evolution of blogging and social networking (and concurrent evolution of tools for this) has it become really easy for a person like Paris, without a web design course background, to get out there and express herself. Now even the large corporations are hyping Facebook and Twitter, with their own YouTube channels and real estate in SecondLife. I think Paris will fare better than most corporations, because the playing field is leveled.

Adobe has finally defined an XML format for Flash, something those of us in the SVG World have long waited for. Well, we weren’t waiting for Flash, it was an XML server-based description of interactive graphics, but who’s counting?

Now that we have XFL and FLA renaming it, can we get a server? I really look forward to this but it remains completely unannounced.