Adobe rolls out iPad-focused magazine publishing tools

Adobe has officially announced its new iPad-focused Digital Publishing Platform, which was used to create the recently released Wired app for the iPad. The idea is to offer an easy way for traditional media publishers to port their content to Apple’s tablet while heeding the company’s strict developer agreement. Although the iPad spurred the creation of the Digital Publishing Platform, it can be used to create content for other tablets and smartphones as well.

The platform combines InDesign CS5 with “additional Adobe publishing technologies” in order to produce what Adobe describes as a visually attractive, magazine-like experience for the iPad. This means that traditional publishers, accustomed to creating layouts in InDesign already, won’t have to move to an entirely different tool to create digital content.

Those “additional Adobe publishing technologies” apparently include an Objective-C compiler (with an XML back-end to store the giant image files)—after first announcing that the Wired iPad app would be created using Adobe AIR, Adobe reworked the Wired app using this new platform so that it wouldn’t run afoul of Apple’s latest guidelines. The strategy seems to have worked—Apple approved the app last week—and it has largely been getting good reviews despite the large file size.

With the ability to embed video, interactive images, slideshows, and more, Adobe’s new solution seems like an attractive option for magazine publishers. Numerous iPad users have already expressed their desire for other magazines to start publishing digital content in the same manner, so it’s likely that others will follow suit now that the tool is publicly available.

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