Publish Online interface SUDDEN NEW GREY BORDER
I use indesign's Publish Online feature to create web apps. It's fantastic, but today whilst enjoying a coffee in town had a shock - some bright spark at Adobe decided that we now needed a fat grey border all the way round the design area. I probably know why they did this, the little pop-up bar at the bottom of the window covers your beautifully crafted design, but I'd worked with this and used it to my advantage. But someone must have thought 'if we create a fat margin the same thickness as the bottom bar, then it won't obscure the design canvas area. But, it's an absolute disaster, so my carefully crafted web apps for smartphones now looks a mess, worse still, on smaller smartphones text is now illegible because the border means it's shrunk even smaller as a result. It literally ruined my day, how could Adobe just suddenly mess with something so important, particularly to mobile screens?
So finishing my coffee, I contemplated the long laborious chat with Adobe, and you know how it goes - 'there's server maintenance being carried out, just wait 4-8 hours'. When I'm told this I now instantly take this as the fob-off. The next thing the chat guy said was 'let me log into your computer and look at your file'. But - I said to the guy, 'I have the browser tab left open from yesterday with this Publish Online doc and it views perfectly. But upon opening a new tab today (the same doc/url), there's a big fat grey margin, it's nothing to do with my file or online doc, it's something Adobe's done to the browser window settings'.
It took a lot of chatting to convince him of what I was saying, I almost felt a game was being played out, ultimately wasting lots of my work time.
Eventually upon asking for the manager (on the 3rd attempt), I was put through to a guy that said 'yes, Adobe's made changes to the Publish Online interface'. Ureka! I knew it, but why had the previous support guy wasted so much of my valuable time?
So yes, Adobe in its infinite wisdom has changed the interface, so 10 hard months of my work building a showcase web-app for my new business using Indesign and Publish Online literally ruined. I said to the guy - 'if you're going to make such a critical change, shouldn't you give the designer the option of having a border, or not having a border. Also, why not give the designer the option to change the background grey to whatever colour they require? After all it's us guys that are paying for the service'
So I was then given the 24-48 hours wait time, I did ask 'why it would take so long, weren't they directly in touch with the development team?'
So my company and its use of Indesign and Publish Online for web apps hangs in the balance, I have to sit and bite my nails whilst the Indesign team decide how they'd like to progress!
