Em futures June 2019
We can’t predict the future, of course, but we can tell you what we’ve been doing recently, and what we’re planning to work on. (None of these are specific commitments nor promises, of course, but we’ll do our best!)
WordsFlow 3.0
WordsFlow 3.0 is fairly close to release at this point, with a whole new Word import engine we built from scratch. (We already have our own Word export engine.)
No offense to Adobe is meant when we say our customers (and we) constantly run into the built-in InDesign Word filter’s bugs and limitations.
So we decided to write our own, which we hope will greatly reduce the problems you and we have seen over the years (WordsFlow is now almost 7 years old!). The new importer will also enable us to add some features which were impossible with the old Adobe importer.
We’ll make it opt-in at first, to ease into its usage, until we’re sure it’s stable enough to take on the world. And any existing links will continue to use the Adobe importer, so you shouldn’t get any nasty surprises on link update or re-link.
(And, no, we don’t have any plans to write our own Excel importer at this point; we’ll continue to use the Adobe-supplied importer for 3.0.)
We don’t plan to charge for this new WordsFlow version, other than normal upgrades from previous InDesign versions. We’re also going to move to a subscription model this year, since that best follows what’s happening with InDesign CC.
DocsFlow for WordPress
The product name may change, but we do have plans to extend our DocsFlow engine to cover link placement and “magic-merge” updates from WordPress sites.
The time is ripe, with more and more web-first magazine, newspaper, and newsletter sites based on WordPress, and with no good solution for print.
We’re still figuring out the details, but we hope to have a beta later this year for interested parties to try out, and help us direct further development. (The best products are designed by their users.)
Plugins for Adobe XD
We don’t have any specific product announcements at this point, but we’re working hard on a whole suite of XD plugins that fit our general expertise. We’re calling them “Data 4 Design” for now. More details later this summer, hopefully right around the time of the major XD release in August.
