We have all read plenty about Steve Jobs since his passing.  He was a visionary and a technical and marketing genius.  Years ago, he had the vision to see the writing on the wall for mobile development and stood his ground in the face of enormous pressure from Adobe, refusing to support flash for the iPhone and iPad.  No doubt that Steve would be standing proud today as the mobile development world takes a big step in the right direction – and a positive direction for yearbooks.

If you have not yet heard, last week it was announced that Adobe would be abandoning its flash plug-in for mobile devices.  This was a major announcement from the company that likely provides the software that 95% of the people reading this newsletter use to develop their yearbooks.  You will still continue to use Photoshop and inDesign to develop your yearbooks the same way you always have, but your online and mobile yearbooks will have the opportunity to be more robust than ever.  What are some of the features that will come to yearbooks as the online version shifts from flash to HTML 5:

1. Custom Development:  With flash, your pages are static, mirroring the book. Once your pages have been created in inDesign, they will not change on the web.  What you see is what you get.  With HTML 5, the data in your inDesign files will be transformed into a more interactive, web and mobile friendly experience.  The yearbook will keep its roots while being more intuitive for today’s web and mobile user interfaces.
2. Interactive Pages:  The yearbook will be much more interactive.  Live polls in the pages of the yearbook that can update daily, weekly or yearly, even years after they are originally released.  Custom video integration and dynamic content will be possible.  Your picture TODAY, side by side with your portrait from 10 years ago.
3. Data Manipulation:  User profiles will be able to link directly to sections about them in the yearbook.  Users will also be able to create their own pages of the yearbook that relate to their friends and their experiences. These pages would only be viewable by the users who created the pages and the people with whom they choose to share those pages.

All of this will be accomplished seemlessly for yearbook staffs.  You will not need a technical or web genius on the staff.  It will be simple and intuitive for the staffs with little to no learning curve, just as Lifepages is today.  Staffs will be able to sell digital editions of the yearbook on e-readers and smart phones, opening up new revenue streams and significantly enhanced versions of the yearbook.

Let’s take a minute to say “Thank You” to Steve Jobs.  He was right, and because of that, we are ALL winners.