Our blog has been pretty quiet for a while — because we’ve been hard at work!

About a half a year ago we teamed up with Nimbleware Consulting to work on a cloud service for editing InDesign templates and it’s been an awesome project!

I’ve been working very closely with Peter Mierau who has been responsible for quite a bit of cloud computing work at Adobe in the past (such as Adobe Stock Photos and Photoshop.com). We’ve hit it off really well, and we’ve made an awesome team! Peter has been responsible for most of the server architecture and the APIs to interact with the service. I’ve been handling the InDesign desktop and InDesign Server interactions as well as the architecture of the web app (done in Flex).

Our pilot client is a website which produces storesign (storesigns.com). They went live about a month ago and are thrilled with the service!

Using InDesign Server on the back-end we get rendering that’s true to what you see in InDesign, and we’ve done a lot of work to ensure the rendering in the browser is true to what you get from the back-end engine. There’s quite a few pitfalls that we’ve had to work around! Performance is awesome and we thing the app looks great too!

We’ve built a really unique architecture around InDesign Server with our own home-grown load balancing which allows for unlimited scaling of the service and incredible performance. Based on the tests we’ve done, the system can currently modify and render over 50,000 documents per day!!! We can scale this up to millions per day really easily.

Peter has done a great job on the API, and the service can seamlessly integrate with any website and database system.

Creating templates to use with the system is super simple — just about any InDesign document will work.

We have a demo of the service on-line with a few sample templates.Go over to PrintUI.com and give it a try!

We’re really excited with our new service, and I hope you are too!