Disable swiping in a DPS app

I was helping a client with their first iPhone app created with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. They wanted to completely disable vertical and horizontal screen-to-screen swiping within the app. Instead, they provided comprehensive navigation throughout the app with buttons they created on each screen.

DPS doesn't have a feature for disabling swiping. But we came up with a workable solution. Here's how:

In each InDesign file you create for the app,

1. Create a layer above all your other layers, and name it "swipe prevention"

2. On the master page, draw a frame that covers the entire page. This frame should be "invisible" with no fill and no stroke.

3. With this frame selected, choose "New State" from the Object States panel menu. This will create a 2-state multi-state object, with the frame you just drew on one state, and a duplicate of the frame on the second state.

4. Name the multi-state object "swipe prevention mso". Check to make sure the multi-state object ended up on the "swipe prevention" layer.

5. With "swipe prevention mso" selected, go to the Folio Overlays panel and fill in the panel as shown below.

6. That's it. The way that this works is that whenever the user tries to swipe to move from screen to screen, instead they will be swiping to change the image on this "invisible" slideshow that fills each screen, preventing the swipe from moving the user from screen to screen.

You can still include slideshows that swipe, scrollable frames, buttons, etc. in the app. Just make sure that all of these interactive elements are on a layer above the "swipe prevention" layer.

If the user swipes on a "hot zone" created by a button, instead of tapping on the button, they will still be able to swipe to an adjacent screen. For this reason, you may wish to check the "Horizontal Swipe Only" option when creating the article. This will arrange all the screens of the article horizontally, preventing vertical swiping entirely. Then, the "swipe prevention mso" only needs to prevent horizontal swiping. In this case, the only way someone can swipe from screen to screen is if they accidentally horizontally swipe on a button, instead of tapping the button.

 

This method can really "quiet" an app and make navigation easier for certain types of apps.

Capture streaming video for DPS projects

Sure, you can include a link to a YouTube or Vimio video in an Adobe Digital Publishing Suite app, but often it is much better to embed the video within the app. This way, the user doesn't need an internet connection to play the video. 

As I've helped numerous corporate clients create their DPS apps, I've found that oftentimes they don't have access to the original MP4 video footage. All they have is what someone else in the company has posted to YouTube.

The trouble is, you cannot “save” video from YouTube to your local hard drive. But a simple utility that I've found to work perfectly for this is SnapzPro X from Ambrosia Software. This is a screen capture utility that can also “capture” video as it streams on your screen. As long as the video is streaming in high quality, this utility will capture the video at equally high quality. I've used this to capture streaming video for a number of real DPS projects, and it works great. Of course, you only want to do this when you or your company own the content that you are streaming and capturing. 

Handy list of iOS fonts

iOSFonts.com is a handy reference guide to all the fonts built into iOS devices. This is handy if you plan on referencing any of these fonts in your ePUB projects. 

If you view the site in Safari on an iOS device, you will see the actual fonts. If you view the site on a desktop browser, most of the fonts will simply display in a browser default font. The site allows you to see which version of the operating system supports each font.

Sadly, Apple hasn't seen the light and added Hobo to the list of fonts built into iOS. Oh well, one can dream!

Join me at PePcon!

I'll be speaking at PePcon, "The Print + ePublishing Conference" in Austin, TX on April 28-May 1, 2013. This will be my fourth year attending and speaking at this conference, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it! It is definitely the "InDesign event of the year". 

This conference is designed by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción for lots of personal interaction between you, the speakers, and other experts in the field of design and publishing. The conference tracks cover a wide variety of topics, including eBook publishing, creating iPad apps, interactive documents, print documents, and more.

I'll be participating in a panel on 4/29 with Diane Burns titled "Moving Your Publication from Print to Tablet", and then teaching a post-conference tutorial on 5/1 called "Publishing Your iPad App: The Hardest Step Explained".

Won't you join me at this conference? When you register, use the code TXKG88 to save $25 off the registration cost. 

How to add a "spin" animation to a DPS project

I recently wrote up a detailed step-by-step tutorial for Adobe's SWAPP iPad app about how to use the 3D and animation features of Photoshop CS6 Extended to make an object rotate 360º, and then how to include that animated rotation in a Digital Publishing Suite iPad app.

If you don't have access to an iPad, you can view the tutorial online here.