Adobe Slate A review and guide
Slate is a iOS app recently released by Adobe as a follow-up to their earlier Adobe Voice tool for creating narrated videos. Slate is free and allows you to create pages of text and pictures with minimal effort and present them on the web in a dynamic and animated fashion. Put another way, it allows people with no web development experience to create impressive web pages, albeit with some caveats.
As you've probably already realised, this review was itself written in Slate as something of a functionality demo.
Features
First I'll run through the options you have for including text and picture content in a Slate page. Note that video is not supported at all, at least as of May 2015.
Pictures
The most interesting features of Slate are primarily based around pictures. These can be imported from your iPad, from Adobe's Lightroom or Creative Cloud, or from the results of searching free photographs online which is where I found the images in this review. In the latter case Slate will automatically add attrbutions to any images you use, which is a handy touch.
There are a variety of ways to present photos, the simplest of which is a single inline image.
Slate also supports the almost ubiquitous collages. These are somewhat customisable, in that photos can be reordered and chosen to fill a particular row, but that's more or less the extent of the customisation. In particular, the crop of a photo can't be altered within the collage, the borders can't be changed and the basic layout that Slate chooses can only be manually altered by means of reordering the photos. That said, it typically does a fairly good job in my opinion. The only real gripe I have is that images with odd aspect ratios, such as panoramas, are typically just cropped instead of appearing in their entirety.
These options are fairly straightforward but it's in the other options Slate offers for displaying images that it really shines. For example, whilst panoramas might not work so well in collages, they really stand out as a full-width image.
As well as full width there's also full screen which works similarly, but fills the entire display. One nice touch is that for full-screen images it's possible to set a focal point - this helps ensure that on any device or orientation, the most important part of the image remains in view.
If you've got a large image you want to showcase but you'd rather not take up the whole screen, there's a clever effect called window which might be what you're looking for. The image is static, as in full screen, but only a small portion of the page views the image at any one time, so the full picture is only revealed as the user scrolls past.
The final image based effect appeared in an update in late May 2015 and it's quite a substantial addition. It offers the ability to insert a full-screen slideshow at any point in the page. Somewhat similar to the full screen image mode, it's nonetheless rather more flexible as its captions are formatted text and can even have smaller images inserted into them.
Glideshows
That's what Slate calls these inline slideshows.
Each one has a caption which can be more or less any rich text. They can even include simple inline images.
Captions may be omitted on any glideshow image, as the next one demonstrates.
Text
There are fewer choices when dealing with text than pictures, which is unsurprising, but in the latest release of Slate then most of the standard options are there. Running text like this is formatted in a font which is dependent on the theme (more on that in a moment) and can include italics and bold.
- There are the usual bullet lists.
- It's not possible to create nested lists.
- Numbered lists work similarly.
- Due to the lack of nesting, it's not possible to mix bullet and nested lists.
- I doubt any of these restrictions will bother most people in the slightest.
There's also a blockquote paragpraph which can be used for quotes or teaser texts. The style of this depends more heavily on the theme than most of the other text formatting options.
One issue I have with the blockquote is that there's no easy way to add an attribution or caption to the bottom of it. But for teaser text it works brilliantly.
Finally, there are two levels of heading, which you'll see used throughout this review. They also tend to be styled quite differently depending on the theme in use.
Usability
One of Slate's primary selling points is that it allows people to create elegant and effective stories without much technical experience, so usability is a key part of the offering.
Managing Stories
Slate's front page couldn't get much simpler. When the application first opens you're first prompted to log in. You'll need an Adobe ID or you can log in via Facebook (which I suspect just creates one for you and links it to your Facebook account). They're free to create and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect some sort of login when they're going to be hosting content for you on their servers, but some people feel strongly about these things.
Once you're logged in, Slate presents you with a set of selected other stories to explore. I think these are intended to act as a combination of inspiration and demos of functionality. Whilst it was useful to take a look the first few times I opened the app, I haven't really used it since.
The very large Create a New Story link makes it very easy to get started, although far more commonly I'm resuming work on an existing story and doing that requires hunting down the comparatively unobtrusive Projects tab selector.
From this screen tapping on a story will edit it and the ellipsis on the right will allow other convenient options. The ability to unpublish is nice to see, just in case you push something half-finished up accidentally.
Story management is easy enough but my main concern at present is how well it'll scale once you have a number of stories. There doesn't seem to be any support for folders, tagging or search, so once you have more than 20-30 stories then finding old ones could be a real drag. This is a hypothetical concern right now as I haven't reached that point, but it's something I'd like to see Adobe address in a future release. I suspect it's a problem that wouldn't be hugely common as stories appear to be sorted in order of most recent edit, so finding things you've been working on recently should always be straightforward.
Editing Stories
The meat and potatoes of the app is, of course, editing the story itself. When you first create a story you'll be need to add the full-screen cover image for it. You're also prompted to add a title and an optional subtitle. You can set a position for these but not freely - Slate constrains the title to be either centered or at one extreme or the other in both axes. I suspect that they need to do this to ensure that their animations during scroll look good.
On the subject, editing any of the full-screen, window or glideshow images work in a very similar way, although captions for these other formats are limited to being on just the left or the right of the screen. Their motion depends on the theme, but typically will slide upwards over the image as the user scrolls down.
In all of the above cases, where the image fixed and the page scrolls "over" it, a crosshairs button appears which allows you to select a focal point. This allows you to select the area of the image you'd most want to appear on any device in any aspect ratio, and Slate will adjust the crop automatically. Whilst doing this there's also a handy preview of how the image would be cropped in whatever's the opposite of your iPad's current orientation.
On images there are also another couple of buttons that can appear in the corner. The information (i) button shows the attribution information of the image if you've used one from public searching. There's also a warning (!) which I've seen a few times, which typically seems to warn you that you've used a lower resolution image than is recommended and hence it may appear blurry on larger or higher resolution displays.
Adding content to the page is as simple as hitting the circled + icons and selecting the type of section you'd like to add. It's simple to change text and pictures between the various options in each case so it's straighforward to play with your layout and see what works best without having to re-add photos. The main exception is with collages and glideshows, neither of which can be changed to or from other types - you'd have to delete them and add the photos back once more.
Adding images is one of the areas where Slate's interface falls down a little in my opinion. After you've chosen the source of your images, a set of small thumbnails appears on the right side of the screen. The window is quite small and it can be difficult to tell which photo to pick if you're looking for a specific one from a set of very similar choices. I can only assume that they're trying not to take up too much screen real-estate, so you can still see the bulk of your story as you make your selection - nice thought, but personally I'd prefer to have something more like Picasa's full screen set of images and a tray to show me those I've selected. That said, I haven't had any actual problems selecting any images - just the annoyance of the small size.
Once image elements are placed it's also possible to move them. This is one of the areas where Slate can be a little quirky because movements of elements on the page, and images within a grid or glideshow, is all done with arrow buttons to move swap it with an adjacent element. In practice this works reasonably well, but if feels a little out of place in a native iPad app - perhaps the developers had an eye toward an eventual web or Android variant and didn't want to risk inconsistency of interface. Either way, it's slightly clunky but it's effective enough.
It's also possible to delete any element - text sections automatically disappear when their contents are entirely deleted and other sections have an explicit delete icon. This exposes another of Slate's slightly rough edges - the lack of any kind of undo functionality. Once an element is changed or deleted, that change is permanent. Many changes are simple enough to repeat, such as re-instering an image, but on a glideshow in particular it coud be infuriating to have to enter a lot of detailed captions again.
That's about all there is to it, really. There are a few other annoyances, such as a lack of hotkeys when using a bluetooth keyboard, but I doubt most of them would get in most people's way.
Themes and Publishing
Once your content is in place the last steps are to choose a theme and publish it for people to see.
Themes are extremely easy to choose - there's a magic wand icon at the top which pops down a list of themes and you just select whichever one you like. There are currently eleven to choose from, although I've seen a few vague promises that more will be added in the future.
The nice thing is that the elements supported by each theme are all consistent, so you're free to flip through them and see which suits your story best without concerns of elements not being supported or being reverted to something else. It's well worth taking a look as there are considerable variations in colours, styles and animations between them. The effects of the theme are updated right there in the editing window immediately so you don't need to preview to see what it'll look like. Slate is very WYSIWYG.
Once you're ready to unleash your story to the world, you just hit the Share button in the top right. You'll be prompted for some basic details, such as whether you want it to be publicly searchable and whether you'd like to put in one of a set of predefined categories; you can specify the name of the author and add a small profile photo; and you can also edit the photo credits that Slate will have automatically added for any publicly searched photos you added.
You'll also need to select the means of sharing. Slate supports sharing a link via Facebook, Twitter, email or text message; or you can just copy the link to the clipboard and paste it into any other service. You can also have a HTML link copied to your clipboard for embedding in a web page - when used this will add a clickable image link to the story, using the cover image and title.
Whichever method of sharing you use the basic result is the same - you story is uploaded to Adobe's servers, which can take a few minutes, and then a link to it is shared via whatever means you selected. A minor niggle is that you can only select one sharing mechanism at a time, but the process can be repeated from either the editing or management screens selecting another one each time. Slate seems to be smart enough to only repeat the actual upload process where you make changes as subsequent attempts are usually significantly faster.
The other point to note is that once a story is published its URL remains the same regardless of any edits you make. This is quite useful as you can publish the URL once and then correct errors and add content later without needing to re-share.
Conclusions
Overall I've been really happy with Slate, particularly for a free app. Frankly I'd have been happy to pay for it in its current form - although I can't say whether I'd have done that without trying it first.
The app is right there on my iPad where I store all my photos anyway so I can start to write stories when I'm out and about, fixing them up later if I need to. Since I commute by train all I need is my iPad and a bluetooth keyboard and I can put together more or less anything in no time.
That said, there are clearly some omissions - I've listed all the major issues I've found earlier in this story. An undo function would be really useful, although you can get some sort of backup functionality by duplicating stories periodically. The most significant feature I'd ask for is the ability to either put stories in hierarchical folders, or some sort of general tagging system to achieve the same thing. I don't think I'll feel the full significance of this until a year or two hence, though - hopefully it'll be sorted by then.
My other worry is the longevity of the product. These stories are hosted on Adobe's own servers and there's no way to back them up or publish to another format. This is fine except that if Adobe decides the product isn't making them any money then they might pull it - hopefully at least they'd offer some way to export the content first.
Related to the future of the product is whether Adobe has any plans to monetise it, or whether they just regard it as a stepping stone to attract new customers to their Creative Cloud offering. I certainly don't have any issue with charging, as long as it's not an outrageous sum, but I think they'll need to be careful how it's done. Perhaps they plan to start charging a small sum for hosting beyond a certain quota, or maybe offering additional themes for either one-off cost or incremental subscription. I have no issue with any of these schemes.
What I would find disappointing, however, is if they suddenly decided that some high-power Creative Cloud memebrship is required. Currently the lowest tier membership is $10 a month, which gives access to photography tools like Photoshop and Lightroom. I suspect this would stretch the upper limit of what I'd be willing to pay for Slate, but if they added some sort of lower tier for a few dollars a month then I'd have very little hesitation signing up.
I should reiterate that I have absolutely no evidence that Adobe consider charging for Slate, now or in the future, this is all pure speculation on my part. I'm sure things will be clearer in a year or two.
That about wraps it up - I hope that's been useful to someone. I'll try to keep this story updated as Adobe release updates, so do check back if you're curious about new features.