More Designer Control for Interactive Projects from InDesign – in5 3.3 Update

My goal when I first conceived of in5 was to put more control into designers’ hands. There was a new world of tablets and smartphones and it was difficult to create content for those devices if you weren’t a developer.

in5 made the process easy by letting you design with InDesign and create interactive experiences that work on all devices.

Six years later and I’m very excited to deliver yet another update that let’s you do more with your interactive content—directly from InDesign—without coding.

This latest update

• Offers new ways to create interactive elements
• Extends the control over existing elements (like video)
• Lets you easily create new types of content (like animated Google Ads)
• Lets you brand the built-in elements of your digital magazines
• Produces smaller files, and
• Let’s your track additional reader behavior with Google Analytics

Let me show you what all of that control looks like…

Customize the branding on your digital magazine

In the video below, you can see a custom logo and custom color in the control bar at the bottom (with all the nifty buttons like zoom, full screen, etc).

In addition to having more control of that bar, you’ll also have more control of the elements inside of your pages.

Unparalleled interactive controls

When Adobe’s DPS (now AEM Mobile) came out, it offered a set of panels known as (Folio) Overlays.

in5 has supported the content produced with these panels for years.

However, Adobe’s continued support for these panels is somewhat lackluster. The panels can be difficult to install, and buggy once installed.

in5 now comes with replacement panels installed automatically.

You’ll now find Interactive Widget panels for

• Audio
• Hyperlinks
• Image Sequences
• Pan & Zooms
• Scrolling Frames
• Slideshows
• Video, and
• Web Content

You’ll also notice that in5 comes with additional panels if you have a Pro license or higher. The new item in that section is the Form Element Data panel. More on that below…

Not only does in5 replace the Overlays panels, it also makes some significant improvements to give you more control over your interactive elements.

Control video like a developer

What if you could trigger an action when a user finishes watching a video?

What if you could ensure that your video auto plays on the first page, even on browsers that restrict auto playing videos before a user has interacted?

Take a look at the video below to see the answer to those questions and more.

You’ll find similar improvements to the Audio settings as well.

Collect better information from readers

Interactivity is about getting the user engaged in your content.

Form inputs are a great way to do that, especially if the user’s input can be saved so they’d see it again when they revisit your app/publication.

The video below shows exactly that.

Defining data types and saving data is all well and good, but if you’re a designer…you probably want your form elements to look as nicely as they function, right?

Style form elements with InDesign

Your form elements now look exactly as they do in InDesign (and they’re still actual, working form elements under the hood in the HTML that in5 generates).

Be sure to watch the video to the end so you can see how to generate different responses based on the user’s choices.

in5 now supports the Clear Form action as well, so you can reset the form elements when need be.

Export directly to Google HTML5 ads

HTML is insanely flexible.

But you don’t need to code HTML to take advantage of its flexibility.

The video below shows you how in5 can generate a fully-compliant HTML5 ad for Google Ads (formerly AdWords).

You don’t need to touch the code at all. Just design and upload. 🙂

To make it even easier to get started creating content with InDesign, in5 now adds document presets for Google Ads (as well as for common Presentation dimensions).

Even more optimized for smaller files

Who doesn’t want smaller files?

They download faster and everybody’s happy!

Check out the video below to see how SVG images are now automatically being compressed to half the size (without losing any quality).

You request, we deliver

So there’s a lot more stuff in this update that I think you’ll enjoy, but I’m sure you have other things to do. 😉

Here’s are some of the highlights that didn’t get their own section above.

• Support for curved animation paths.
• New ability to track PDF Downloads from Viewer Display Frame using Google Analytics.
• New ability to track pages with InDesign bookmark names, instead of page numbers.
• Support for Thumbnail images as anchored objects in live text.

And of course, dozens of bugs have been squashed in this new version.

What are you waiting for?

This new control and flexibility is waiting for you to discover it.

If you don’t yet have a license, you can test the demo for free.

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