I must be slower than slow about this iPad business. Another forehead slapping moment this morning.
We go to great pains with LensWork Extended to give our viewers a rich visual experience. In Acrobat-speak, this means using a so-called "Full Screen Mode" presentation. Acrobat includes this handy little feature, but does not default to it. That means we have to invoke Full Screen Mode on purpose so that our LensWork Extended monographs don't look like this . . .
. . . with Acrobat tool bars and the clutter of the Windows desktop, etc. to spoil the visual experience.
We'd rather see the monograph be a pure experience, with a clutter-free clean presentation one would expect when looking at artwork or even a paper book— something like this . . .
One of the complicating things about making a Full Screen presentation is that all of the normal navigation controls of Acrobat or the Adobe Reader disappear. We therefore make these available in our layouts by including a navigation bar on the bottom that include icons for various actions and encode all the linking actions in Acrobat. It makes for a nicer presentation, but is somewhat time consuming and nitpicky for us to do. Needless to say, we're glad to do it so our readers have the better visual experience.
Things change, however, with the iPad. GoodReader (and maybe the other readers, I don't know) automatically present the PDF page filling the screen entirely. They must have confidence that users know how to flip pages etc. as part of the GoodReader app. For us, that's great because there are no tool bars and desktop icons that need to be hidden to clean up the visual experience. Essentially, by default our PDF monographs will be "Full Screen" without us having to force the PDF into this non-default display mode like we need to do for the PC and Mac.
The obvious implication is that now even the clutter of the nav bar icons and actions can be removed from the presentation. Very nice. Here are a few examples from a test file I designed just to see what it would look like.
Sweet! One of the iPad objectives, I think, was to bring the user more in contact with the content and less involved in the software that brings the content into view. This is a good example of how they've succeeded in that objective with their approach to the app implementation. As a publisher, I love it — a cleaner, more impactful presentation without all the visual mess of the app's icons and interface getting in the way of enjoying the real reason you picked up the iPad in the first place. Content really is King, and bravo to Apple and the iPad for understanding this.
