The InDesigner

I was watching the local news coverage here in Miami, where I’m speaking at the InDesign Conference, and there’s been a lot of talk about the causes of yesterday’s two-hour power outage that hit us (and a lot of south Florida) in the middle of the day. Personally, I think the real explanation for why the lights went out is that a demonstration given by Adobe’s Michael Ninnes and Tim Cole here at the keynote speech was so cool that it sucked all the power from the grid.

In what was referred to as a “technology preview” — meaning it’s technology Adobe has, but will neither confirm nor deny will appear ever in any product — Michael and Tim demonstrated the direct export of InDesign layouts to Flash, including the addition of page transitions (established, with nice previews, within InDesign) for each spread. When opened up in Flash, each InDesign spread had been converted to a movie clip in its own frame in the Flash timeline, and simple button navigation (also created in the InDesign document first) allowed the user to click through the exported Flash movie and see the page transitions that were established in InDesign.

Again, this is functionality that Adobe will not definitively say will be in InDesign CS4 or Flash CS4, but they’ve clearly spent a good deal of time thinking about it and developing it to this level, so keep those fingers crossed. We could be looking at an integrated means to turn our print layouts into easily navigable digital Flash editions, which I’d be very happy to have at my disposal.

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