- Where Does a DPS App Fit In?
- What Exactly Is Adobe DPS?
- The Adobe DPS Generic Workflow
- What You Should Have to Build an App
- Final Thoughts
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The Adobe DPS Generic Workflow
Let’s step back and look at how an app is created using Adobe InDesign and Adobe DPS Single Edition. Check out the Single Edition Publishing graphic on the Adobe DPS site visual overview.
Here’s the generic workflow from start to finish:
- The process is started in Adobe InDesign (see Figure 5). The really cool thing about these apps is that, aside from some general design rules to follow such as page size of 1024x768 (and vice versa for the other orientation), you can use your InDesign skills as-is. The general design rules I mentioned are best summed up on these websites:
- Adobe blog: “Design Decisions for Digital Publishing Apps”
- Adobe website: “Creating source InDesign documents”
- From the InDesign files, you create a folio using the Folio Builder panel in InDesign. A folio is sort of like your “working” app in InDesign. When you create the folio using the Folio Builder panel, you add the native files (.indd, images, etc.) into the folio as “articles.” To me, a folio is kind of like a book file (File > New > Book). You add InDesign files to a folio (it doesn’t actually move your native files, just tracks them and links to them), you organize the articles you create, and you export as an app from the same panel, eventually (see Figure 6).
- Add interactivity using various panels like Buttons and Forms, or the Overlay Creator panel (see Figure 7).
- Test the folio on your device and share it with other people to review from the Folio Builder panel.
- Build the app.
- Submit the app the to Apple App Store.
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Figure 5 Create the InDesign content
You can either create new InDesign content or repurpose existing InDesign content (like a print document) for your app. InDesign files become “articles” in the app (as you’ll learn about in the next step).
Each “article” in the app can be a new InDesign file. All of your articles, along with their respective images, can each be in their own folders. All of the article folders are then organized in a single folder. To give you a better visual, check out this video.
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Figure 6 Create a folio in InDesign
There is so much interactivity you can add to your folio, from simple buttons and links to HTML content and panoramas. The amazing types and number of interactivity is what sets apart an app from, say, an e-book. Well, that and the fact that it’s an app and sold through the Apple App Store. Here’s a word of warning: Once you start adding interactivity, you can’t stop.
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Figure 7 Add interactivity to the folio
It’s really cool that you can hook up your iPad, for instance, via USB to your computer, open Adobe Content Viewer on the iPad, and be able to preview the folio from InDesign directly on the device (see Figure 8). You can also test locally using the local Adobe Content Viewer (on your computer), but it’s not the real deal. For some helpful hints on best practices for interactivity, check out this Help page.
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Figure 8 Test the folio
If you want others to see the folio, you can email them from the Folio Builder panel by sending them a link (see Figure 9). They can then download the folio in Content Viewer on their device to see it, or click a link to see a less than stellar preview on the Folio Producer website.
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Figure 9 Share the folio
This part of the process is the longest. As you’ll see in the next section, “What You Should Have to Build an App,” creating an app from a folio is not a two-step process. Okay, so actual creation is only a few steps, starting with choosing Create App from the Folio Builder panel in InDesign. But, the creation process becomes more time-consuming when you generate the certificates and provisioning profiles (read the PDF below) that are required to create the app in the DPS App Builder (see Figure 10).
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Figure 10 Build the app using the DPS App Builder
Download and follow the PDF guide for single edition created by Adobe; it’ll be pretty straightforward.
This final part of the process is where you submit the app file (a .zip) to the Apple App Store (see Figure 11). After registering to be an Apple Developer, you are given a login for the iTunes Connect website. Here is where you upload and submit the app to Apple for approval (hopefully). After filling out information about the app including price and category, you wait for approval from Apple.
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Figure 11 Submit the app to the Apple store via the iTunes Connect website