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Digital Flywheel
I recently came across a web-based tool named Digital Flywheel. Developed by Database Publishing Consultants, Inc. or DPCI, Digital Flywheel has been developed as a add-in for existing business applications—for example marketing web portals, where users can create customised documents and collateral on-demand from a template library.
What makes Digital Flywheel unique from other solutions is that it uses a Rich Internet Application to present the document template and customise it, while the document template is an InDesign document and InDesign Server is used on the backend for document composition. I've commented on some of the main areas that I've identified within the solution.
Assigning Variable Tags
Digital Flywheel allows the user to tag the InDesign template directly within the web application. The advantage of this is that the end-users (perhaps a marketing department) doesn't need to know how to use InDesign; they simply receive the templates from a designer, upload them to Digital Flywheel, and then the page is rendered in the web browser where they can assign the variables to the page objects by "marking up" selected objects with the corresponding variable tag. In addition to inserting variable elements in page objects, Digital Flywheel also enables users to insert nested variables inside a block of text.
Assigning variable tags to page objects. Click image to enlarge.
Assigning data sources
Data can either be applied to templates from a data file (e.g. XML), or defined by the end user. Users can either use a single data source, for example campaign promotion information, or connect to a database and create for merging templates with customised data.
Interface Controls
Perhaps one of the most intriguing and impressive elements of Digital Flywheel is it's level of control and relative simplicity. Essentially, DPCI has developed a dumbed-down version of InDesign, where they provide some basic tools to let users move objects around the page, resize frames and their contents. When resizing image frames, the non-image area is displayed with an opaque background, mimicking InDesign's behaviour.
In addition to drag-and-drop controls, Digital Flywheel also provides more precise editing of page objects through changing x and y coordinate values, object scaling and set object angles, all defined in value boxes. When you make a change the effect is immediately applied to the page.
In addition, all available swatches in the InDesign document are available to the end-user and can be applied to page objects, including strokes, text, etc.
VDP Support
While Digital Flywheel certainly delivers an impressive user experience, it's unclear on their level of support for VDP. The solution does not appear to support common VI languages, such as PPML, VPS, VIPP or others, as their list of print export options is limited to PDF and PostScript. Perhaps someone from DPCI can clarify whether they produce optimised print files (i.e. reuse common elements).
Summary
The user experience offered by Digital Flywheel is quite impressive. The level of intuitive user control in the RIA environment makes it easy-to-use, without the need for any elaborate set of instructions.
One of the main criticisms for delivering page layout tools in a RIA environment has been in the differences between the composition environment of the Web-based interface (typically Flash or Silverlight) and the backend composition engine (InDesign Server, Quark Server, XSL-FO, other). Both the RIA and composition engine use different paragraph composers, and as a result, the page that is rendered and presented in the RIA isn't necessarily what will be produced in the final document output. However, an interesting point to note is that Adobe Flash Player 10 has the ability to emulate the paragraph composer used by InDesign. While it's unclear which RIA is used in Digital Flywheel (maybe someone from DPCI can clarify), support for this new feature in Flash Player 10 (if it's not already supported) shows promise for the future of document template editing in RIA-enabled solutions.
In summary, Digital Flywheel is an impressive solution and is certainly worth a closer look. You can learn more and view an online demo on the Digital Flywheel product page.
Posted on Thursday, 9 April 2009 at 3:13 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/206
Comments
Elliot, thanks for the review! We are always happy to see interest in the Digital Flywheel platform.
You make a good point about the accuracy of composition in a web-based interface. At this point we have not built a Flash or SilverLight component for Digital Flywheel (DFW). The interface is entirely HTML/CSS/Ajax driven.
We have been exploring Flex-based interfaces which will allow for more accurate previews of blocks of text in the DFW interface. Adobe has released a sample implementation of the "Distributed Copy Editor" which works like InCopy in a browser. We may end up integrating a similar implementation with our product depending on customer needs.
With regards to VDP formats, we just haven't had the request to implement these features from our customers. Most of our clients are looking to build and create one-off files. Companies such as XMPIE and PageFlex have a leg up on partnerships and technology to handle high-volume VDP. The release of APPE 2.0 gives us hope that a relatively simple to integrate solution for VDP output to all enabled devices is possible.
Posted by Ivan Mironchuk on Tuesday, 14 April 2009 at 1:48 AM