Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Reviews of photography products that enhance the enjoyment of taking pictures. Published frequently but irregularly.
A Peek At Your Future Portfolio?
14 January 2013
We've never seen a Julieanne Kost video tutorial we didn't like. They're practical and useful and make you want to call in sick to play around in Photoshop or Lightroom trying out what you just learned.
So when we ran across Publish your Photography for iPad with Creative Cloud we held all our calls, canceled our appointments and sat back to enjoy the 20 minute presentation.
And we would have called in sick, too, but there's a catch, Hilda.
SOPHISTICATED BUT SIMPLE
Still, it's worth 20 minutes. Because it shows you 1) what a sophisticated tablet portfolio might look like and 2) how easy it is to make one. Along the way, she highlights the beauties of using InDesign on the Creative Cloud, which doesn't hurt either.
But it really should have been a 40 minute show. She covers a lot of ground.
We doubt we have to persuade anyone of the usefulness of putting your portfolio on a tablet. But how practical is it?
We've reviewed some innovative approaches like Nat Grahek's StickAblums. And if you find Kost's approach intimidating, you might prefer the simplicity of Grahek's service -- even if it's more expensive than a Creative Cloud subscription.
But Kost goes well beyond the slide show format of Grahek's service. And we find that compelling.
She shows a sample iPad app that she made herself without a designer or programmer. Anyone with a Creative Cloud membership can use Digital Publishing Suite to create and submit an unlimited number of apps to the Apple Store.
INTERACTIVITY
It's not a simple app, though. In addition to a built-in table of contents, she built one of her own to control how the viewer interacts with the work. And interactivity is the big draw, drawing the viewer into your work.
She demonstrates the following features: scrolling text in a text frame, image sequences in a graphic frame, integrated slide shows with transitions, buttons to select before and after images, filmstrip navigation of a large image with updated metadata as a caption, embedded video, scrolling graphics, embedded RSS feeds, hyperlinking to your Web site within the app, pan and zoomable images, different sized pages.
About eight minutes in, she opens InDesign and shows you how to build the app using separate articles combined into a folio or folder for the app.
You can preview the app on your tablet or desktop, which is a very helpful feature as you add the interactive features. She demonstrates how to add them, too. Click by click. And no, it isn't hard.
PUBLISHING
With a completed InDesign project, the next step is to publish, which involves creating the app (which InDesign does for you) and submitting the app to Apple. Adobe has made this pretty easy, too, boiling it down to three steps Kost outlines just past the 18 minute mark.
You name the app, load the icons (another little secret) and splash screens with a drag and drop, enter your Apple Certificates (with another drag and drop), then create the app (a developer and a distribution version) to submit to Apple.
THE CATCH
In that last segment, she reveals the catch. You have to register as an Apple iOS Developer for $99 a year.
Ouch.
But if you have a Creative Cloud subscription you can work on an app until you feel it's worthy of investing in the fee. And nothing obliges you to give it away, either.
And what you'll work on, we suspect, is the interactivity of this new medium. Ian Coristine's One in a Thousand remains an impressive argument for telling your story interactively. It's nice to see Adobe make the tools available for ordinary mortals to try it out.
And perhaps in the future you won't have to be a "developer" to submit your portfolio to distributors like Apple.