CHICAGO — (BUSINESS WIRE) — September 25, 2014 — Silicon Publishing will unveil their new software product, Silicon One, at the Graph Expo 2014 conference in Chicago. While Silicon Publishing has been building online editing solutions for over a decade, including some of the largest implementations in the world, Silicon One represents the first time they have attained speed, quality, and affordability by turning to methods that would not have worked just five years ago.
Silicon One features a responsive, mobile-friendly, form-based UI, with very fast previews rendered from InDesign Server so users can quickly see how their content changes will be reflected in the output.
The Two Approaches: Server- and Client-side Imaging
When Adobe released InDesign Server in 2005, it raised the bar in the quality of output one could get for images generated through automation. For the first time, web-to-print solutions could pass requests from a web browser (or "client") to a server and trigger the InDesign engine to produce the very highest quality print output possible. Yet there was a downside to this server-side imaging approach: it was slow.
Passing a request in those days would produce stunning, beautiful output, yet the user experience was far less than desirable. Users would experience noticeable wait-times for previews to return from the InDesign Server, which at the time was not highly optimized for speed or usage in a server context.
Silicon Publishing found a clever but very complex alternative: painstakingly re-creating the entire document model from InDesign directly in the browser, and letting users edit directly on the canvas of the document they were editing, or seeing their form-based edits reflected on that canvas immediately. This is the approach of Silicon Publishing's flagship product Silicon Designer. While Silicon Designer is perhaps the highest quality online editing tool, it is a complex solution geared for a high-end market.
Back to the Server
Today we see that servers are exponentially faster and the InDesign Server software is far better as a true server product. The code that Silicon Publishing has perfected over 14 years of InDesign automation adds a third factor producing lightning-fast speed. The server-side approach that was absurd even in 2010, is now becoming powerful.
"Advances in server hardware, the InDesign Server product from Adobe, and our own codebase, have made old school approaches that would not have worked just a few years ago suddenly viable. We are excited to offer Silicon One, which brings high-quality online editing to a broad user base."
-- Aaron Hodges, Silicon Publishing COO
When Limits are your Friends
Silicon One is intended for companies that wish to have tight control over the design characteristics of documents, to maintain brand integrity, and supports the most common use cases. Silicon One leaves the design in the offline template creation process, and lets users edit anything about the text or images of a document online. Silicon One does not provide an "InDesign on the Web" capability like Silicon Designer, which is intended for companies that wish to provide a true WYSIWYG-on-the-web experience to their users.
Franchises, for example, typically want to lock down the design characteristics of documents, to maintain brand integrity. Silicon One handles this sort of use case perfectly: with an effective user experience and an easy template setup process using Adobe InDesign. The InDesign plug-in provided with the solution even includes the ability to see from right within InDesign how the document template being set up will look on the web, as it leverages the browser technology that has been built in to the recent Creative Cloud versions of the product.
"We are thankful to have worked with Adobe's unsurpassed technology all these years and to be able to bring InDesign Server solutions to a broader market. Between Silicon Designer and Silicon One we now cover all online editing use cases we have seen in a very efficient way."
-- Max Dunn, Silicon Publishing CEO
Learn more: siliconpublishing.com/silicon1/
sales@siliconpublishing.com or contact Max Dunn at (925) 935-3899.
ABOUT SILICON PUBLISHING
Silicon Publishing is the world leader in automating web-to-print and multi-channel publishing with InDesign. Silicon Publishing has over 13 years of experience delivering best-of-class publishing solutions for some of the world’s top brands including Nike, Google, Amazon, Hallmark, Shutterfly, and Disney.
Contact:
Silicon Publishing
Max Dunn, 925-935-3899
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