Manish Jethani http://manishjethani.com <mx:Blog source="/dev/random" ... Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:45:47 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/mannu# readersThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site. Issuu Platform http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mannu/~3/359055096/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/08/issuu-platform/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:35:15 +0000 Manish Jethani http://manishjethani.com/?p=169 Last night Issuu released its new platform site for developers, designers, and anyone interested in using the technology.

What can you build on the Issuu platform?

As of now, you can customise the online publication viewer to include your company logo, change the background, modify the buttons, and do pretty much anything to the UI — in other words, infuse it with your own branding. The viewer has already been available, since its very first release, in four different themes: Grey, Grass, White, and Wood. Now you can create your own themes, using a combination of XML and either Adobe Flash or any standard image editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

Moving forward, Issuu will be releasing new UI components and data APIs through the new Issuu Platform & Services site.

Issuu Markup Language

From the manual:

The user interface of Issuu’s online publication viewer is configured using a simple, dynamic, XML-based UI markup language called Issuu Markup Language (IML). Skin libraries in either SWF 9 or PNG, JPG, or GIF format provide the graphics for interface objects, whereas the objects themselves are laid out using IML markup.

What does IML markup look like?

Here’s an example:

<button action="openUrl:http://platform.issuu.com/"
  upState="#PlatformButton_up" overState="#PlatformButton_over"
  downState="#PlatformButton_down"
  toolTip="Issuu Platform &amp; Services"
  left="35" top="18" />

It’s not very different from HTML and other XML-based UI languages like Mozilla’s XUL and Adobe’s MXML (surprise!). If you’re familiar with any of these technologies, you should have no trouble picking up IML.

Is it a general-purpose language? Almost. Currently it’s tied to the Issuu platform, specifically the viewer.

You can learn more from the language reference and the many tutorials available on the site.

Also check out the sample themes (source included).

The Mashable Theme Example

Yesterday, I put together a quick ’n dirty Issuu theme for the popular social networking news site called Mashable. Essentially it’s a customisation of the Crayon theme with some Mashable branding thrown in. The header, in particular, looks exactly like the one you see on mashable.com. It took me 15 minutes to create the theme, an example of how even a person with absolutely no design skill whatsoever can easily customise the Issuu experience for potentially millions of users online.

Mashable actually used the theme in its story announcing the release.

Learn More

You can join the group on Google to participate and interact with other users of the Issuu platform, ask questions, and share your views and experiences with the community.

I’ve been working very closely with the Issuu team for more than a year now to bring this project to fruition. Naturally, I’m very excited today to see all of this finally come out to the public. All I can say is: Hurray!

]]> http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/08/issuu-platform/feed/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/08/issuu-platform/ How to embed Issuu in Presentation mode http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mannu/~3/358081212/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-embed-issuu-in-presentation-mode/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:17:29 +0000 Manish Jethani http://manishjethani.com/?p=167 Amit Agarwal over at Digital Inspiration has done a good job of explaining Issuu’s new Presentation mode. You should know that it’s possible to use this new mode even when embedding an Issuu publication into your own web page or blog, just as I had done in one of my posts. Though this feature is not fully supported yet, it works fairly well and is easy enough to use if you’re willing to do a tiny bit of HTML editing.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Go to the wizard and get the HTML embed code.
  2. Append a &amp;viewMode=presentation to the embed URL.
  3. Adjust the dimensions of the embedded object to suit the new single-page view.

In steps 2 and 3, you’ll have to modify both the object and the embed elements.

...backgroundColor=1b1c20&amp;layout=grey&amp;viewMode=presentation" />

When you paste the final code into a web page, you should be able to see a preview of the document in Presentation mode.

]]> http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-embed-issuu-in-presentation-mode/feed/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/07/how-to-embed-issuu-in-presentation-mode/ Britain from Above http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mannu/~3/357425052/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/06/britain-from-above/#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:53:51 +0000 Manish Jethani http://manishjethani.com/?p=164 A new television series on the BBC, called Britain from Above, uses some stunning imagery based on satellite data to show life in Britain as seen from the skies. You can see visualisations of daily activity, such as the passing of ships through the channels, the takings off and landings of aeroplanes, even the traffic on the streets, and, last but not least, active telephone conversations — the city truly comes alive. Perhaps I’m not the only one to notice the eerie resemblance here with the sonar-based visualisations seen in the recent Hollywood blockbuster The Dark Knight.

Steven Webster reflects on this from the point of view of both rich end-user experiences as well as the intelligent use of such rich network data. It’s a must-read.

]]> http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/06/britain-from-above/feed/ http://manishjethani.com/blog/2008/08/06/britain-from-above/