It's been a busy week for MagDesigner. Exciting meetings with Quark, the Digital Magazine Awards, Adobe and those talented folk over at eDition Digital.

With the iPad quickly becoming of more interest to publishers than more traditional web based eMags, we are all waiting to see how these publishers tackle Apple's tablet platform. Slovenian based eDition have proved in the past they have the capability to produce a solid and user friendly eMag solution. With their client base growning massively over the last two years and include a few award winning titles. Now they have added iPad support with more features being released before the end of the summer.

So what's new? Well those familiar with the eDition software know it's not like some of the others in the same market. Designers download the eDition software (Windows only but don't let that put you off) and using PDFs produced from InDesign for instance, you can add interactive content before exporting to multiple platforms.

Let's say you have just designed the latest page of Earth Periodical magazine (oooh, nice plug) you import the PDF into eDition. Now using a familiar Adobe-like interface you can add interactive elements. You can add a gallery, with animated thumbnails. You can add video, either streaming from YouTube or integrated MP4s. This is a great feature. Most people that view digital magazines do so with a wireless internet connection present so the ability to stream of YouTube keeps file size small whilst offering good quality video to your readers as well as access to millions of videos for extra content. It means you can boost social networking results as well as incorporate video directly into your magazine. Very handy if you have a lot of video content.

Web links and email links can easily be intergrated as can pop up windows. If you want a window with more info or a picture, then it's as easy as asigning a picture to a specific link drawn using the eDition software and adding a slide on or pop up transition.

Contents information is easily set. And there are some very nice little additions. You can have a 5 second animated intro video that will auto roll when your App is launched, great for branding.The page swipe gestures are very smooth and intuitive for iPad users, with vertical and horizontal scrolling working a treat.

The big (and seriously impressive) feature of eDition is that it's one for all. And by that I mean you build one issue and eDition can push it to the iPad, iPhone and to the web. No alternative versions are needed. An excellent, true multi-platform publishing solution. This is simply amazing and a void that has desperately needed to be filled for most publishers.

One feature eDition does not offer is dual orientation. The Adobe software for instance requires the designing of vertical and horizontal pages. Personally as a designer I enjoy the challenge of designing for dual orientation and with a bit of thought it can be used to great effect. However it is also very time consuming and has been a big drain on publishing resources. For instance Sports Illustrated a while back said it couldn't sustain dual orientations. Dennis Publishing's Monkey magazine (now closed) couldn't support dual orientations. So even though I will personally miss the feature I can understand why it has been removed from the eDition tools. It is nice but not essential. Most readers, if not all, choose either portrait or landscape to read, and once chosen they tend to stick with it.

Using eDition you can choose to build an issue in either orientation, personally I'm a fan of landscape and it translates better to desktop online magazines better than portrait.

So make your PDFs in InDesign or Quark, use the eDition tools to add video, links, pop-ups and galleries. Add your intro video, contents information and branding options then make it live. Now everyone with the iPad App can view the issue and everyone online can view it also. All from the same, one magazine. 

Gone are the days when publications like iGIZMO need to be built twice, once for iPad and a separate issue for the Ceros online platform. It's unsustainable. With the Adobe Desktop Viewer nowhere in sight, eDition offers a very impressive service, as they always have.

As for the App itself, it's hosted on the eDition developer page, meaning you don't need to go through the hassle of setting up a developer account. Simply pay the initial App fee, eDition build the App based on your branding guidelines, then simply wait for Apple to approve (unavoidable part of the process) then when your issue is made live it instantly pops up ready to read. Any changes once live are instantly updated, no resubmission since the App is simply a window for your issue. Add to this the option of viewing either online, or downloading to your iPad for offline reading make the eDition iPad solution incredibly appealing to the thousands of publishers that cant afford the high costs of the Adobe platform.

As more features are announced I'll be writing about them here, but if you're looking for a good solid iPad and eMag publishing solution, then eDition has once again proven they can make it all possible. With a little thought, good planning and great design, you can do some cool-ass shit with these tools.

As a designer and maker of interactive magazines, tools like these get me excited again. It's an interesting solution and one well worth you looking into, whether you're a large or small publisher.

For more information visit the eDition Digital website here.