ETA on upcoming features

[MPete]

I have been building a comparison table of 60+ flip page tools over the last few weeks and I hadn't known about MegaZine3. In my opinion, MegaZine comes out trump so far but still lacking features that others provide (which I assume will soon be available by way of plugins and updates which is exciting). Just wondering if the bug tracker will be used for feature requests or the wiki a way of listing and discussing who can action developing them or if they are being considered. I'm already looking at ways of building my own plug ins and would be good to have a repository to share them with other users.

Although MegaZine is feature rich, here is a complete list of features I've gathered from other systems (without providing reference to those that use them). With the plug-in system, I think these are only a matter of time to be implemented. A lot of them are fluff and some not relevant but gives users the chance to add if they choose.

I've not looked over what the full system provides so please correct me if I've labelled features incorrectly or if you have further information to add.

Rating Key
✔ are available in the standard set up
X are not available and no work around is known
~ are for features kind of usable, ie the feature isn't bundled with MegaZine but a way or demonstration of implementing is known.
? unknown

Core
✔ Self hosting
✔ Overall Speed: (Fast)
✔ Google Analytics
✔ Self-hosted statistics: Once statistics are implemented these are all available for use
~ Statistics/Event Logging (available through JavaScript API but not implemented for users to access)
X GUI Software (for generating xml, assets etc)
X Community repository
X Community links

File formats
~ Accepts PDF files: direct file cannot be embedded, must be converted to image or swf via pdf2swf
✔ Accepts JPG (Image) files
✔ Accepts SWF files
✔ GIF animations
✔ SWF animations
✔ PDF to SWF conversion
~ PDF to Image conversion: Can be worked around with free software (not bundled with MegaZine)
~ Accepts DOC files: Can be printed to PDF and converted to swf with free software (not bundled with MegaZine3)
~ Accepts PPT (PowerPoint) Can be printed to PDF and converted to swf with free software (not bundled with MegaZine3)
✔ Accepts MP4 files
✔ Accepts M4A files
✔ Accepts MOV files
✔ Accepts MP4V files
✔ Accepts 3GP files
✔ Accepts 3G2 files
✔ Accepts FLV files
✔ Accepts MP3 files
~ YouTube Embedding: Can be worked around with popup
~ Facebook Video embedding (swf): Can be worked around with popup
~ Vimeo Video embedding: Can be worked around with popup
~ Google Video embedding: Can be worked around with popup

Customizations
✔ Plug-in architecture
✔ Customisable interface
✔ White Label
✔ External API
✔ Update after publishing
✔ Self maintainable
✔ Same day publishing
✔ Embedded rich media
✔ Vector content (swf)
✔ Dynamic XML for page content
✔ Full screen photo galleries
✔ In-page links
✔ In-page link tooltips
✔ Customisable in-page link tooltips
~ Polygon links/tooltips (ie more than 4 points). Good for e-commerce product tooltips, not available via XML?

Social / Subscription
✔ Link to page / Permalink
X Comments / publication: Can work around by linking comment page to permalink or internal page link
X Comments / page: Can work around by linking comment page to permalink or internal page link
X Comments / article: Can work around by linking comment page to permalink or internal page link
X Reviews/Ratings: Can be implemented as embedded form or pupup html
X Share / Send to Friend: Can work around by linking comment page to permalink or internal page link
X Embed code: Can be worked around but not officially implemented
X RSS: Can be worked around but not implemented
X E-mail marketing: Can be worked around
X Facebook Integration (plug-in not yet available)

Downloading
~ Download publication: Can be worked around with internal page link to load pdf
? Offline reading
? EXE Download
✔ Print individual pages (print plugin)
✔ Print by page range
~ Print entire publication: depends on book size, limited by Flash's printing implementation. PDF download possible as an alternative (printpdf plugin)
✔ Selectable text (for copy/paste) (txt element with @selectable="true")
✔ Save/Download individual pages (printpdf plugin)
X Copy to clipboard

E-commerce
X Shopping Cart: Can be worked around with popup
X Wish List: Can be worked around with popup

Navigation
✔ Thumbnails of pages when navigating
X Thumbnail overview of pages (table of contents)
✔ Zoomed in flipping
✔ Full screen mode
✔ Auto scale
✔ Keyboard navigation
✔ Extendable keyboard navigation (changing keys, adding shortcuts for all events). Possible but restrictive via JavaScript
✔ Auto flip / Slideshow
✔ Multiple zoom levels
✔ Zoom extend (define max and min)
✔ Auto-zoom to fill screen size
✔ Auto pan with mouse
✔ Mouse wheel zooming
✔ Double-click zooming
~ Back issues archive: Can be worked around
~ Internal links between pages
X Different page sizes in single publication
X Button to zoom to fit width
X Button to zoom to fit height
X Button to revert to 1:1 size
✔ View in "book" mode
X View in "scroll" mode

Interactivity
✔ Text search
✔ Text search highlighting
✔ Embedded forms
✔ Background music
✔ Interaction sounds
✔ Mute sounds
✔ Simultaneous multi-page flipping
~ Bookmark pages: Can be worked around but not implemented (there's a bookmarks plugin in the works)
X Page notes
X Drawing annotation and saving on page
X Page snapshots
X Page tear
✔ Vertical flipping
✔ 360 degree flipping

Accessibility
✔ Google Search Engine Optimisation
✔ Text-only version
✔ Embedded forms
~ Protected / Subscription-based viewing: Can be worked around but not implemented
X iPhone support: Can use jpg and JavaScript linked to megazine.mz3 (plugin not yet available) Flash engine not compatible
X Speech Synthesis

Other Information
✔ Page caching
- Load size (kb): 700kb (including all plug-ins, excluding page content)

[Hans Nücke]

Thank you for the overview!
We'll add in the missing spaces soon and also will give an outlook about planned features / road map (like search, print, ... which will be available very soon!)

We might also give price information, although I prefer having one source only, to keep things consistent.

And that single source should be the price list published on our "commercial site": Price List

[Florian Nücke]

Wow, nice overview! Stickied for now. As Hans said, we're working on closing some major gaps such as search and print. I'll have to find the time to look through everything else, and will think about possible implementations after the search and print are done.

[kongo09]

Great list. I've also looked at many viewers over the recent weeks and must say: this one has the potential to rule them all!

I wouldn't agree with the rating of PDF usage. This is NOT included in this viewer and only achievable via prior conversion. Adding a functionality to directly display PDF files would be of value for many people and ticking this one off just because of the existance of pdf2swf takes out the incentive to think hard about a better solution ;-)

[MPete]

Great list. I've also looked at many viewers over the recent weeks and must say: this one has the potential to rule them all!

I wouldn't agree with the rating of PDF usage. This is NOT included in this viewer and only achievable via prior conversion. Adding a functionality to directly display PDF files would be of value for many people and ticking this one off just because of the existance of pdf2swf takes out the incentive to think hard about a better solution ;-)

In my opinion pdf2swf is a solution to displaying pdf files with a single conversion process. Otherwise you can simply download a pdf or pop up a pdf on top of the page flipping engine. In terms of actually embedding the original pdf into an interactive/animated page flipping engine would be an achievement but is it really necessary?

I've changed my rating to "kind of" because if kind of is supported but in a round about way.

[Florian Nücke]

Loading PDFs would of course rock bigtime. There has been talk about adding this functionality to the AlivePDF classes, which represent a little PDF framework for AS3. As soon as that's working I'm hoping to find the time to write a little plugin using AlivePDF to load PDFs directly into the engine.

[MPete]

Loading PDFs would of course rock bigtime. There has been talk about adding this functionality to the AlivePDF classes, which represent a little PDF framework for AS3. As soon as that's working I'm hoping to find the time to write a little plugin using AlivePDF to load PDFs directly into the engine.

Now THAT would be something! pdf embedded in Flash, some form of iPhone support. Got to keep up with everything changing so fast...

[davidwhitton]

First of all thanks for a great piece of software, I just tried your demo site/book and it's brilliant! I would definitely agree with the position on PDF integration. For those of us that produce PDF's, it would really be nice to put those straight into megazine without adding yet another tool to the workflow. iPhone support would be good too (especially since there will be a LOT of iPad users out there soon too!). Not sure on the progress with search and Print but obviously those are essential but as with all of these new features/enhancements we're happy to wait so as your tool becomes more and more popular please don't let the few "hurry-up"ers ruin it for the rest of us....
Thanks again and keep up the excellent work!
 

[vitto32]

Navigation
X Button to zoom to fit width
X View in "scroll" mode

Downloading
~ Download publication: Can be worked around with internal page link to load pdf

Those are the ones I miss more. Lot of flipping books have the ability to zoom on single page and navigate without flip capabilities. Like Acrobat PDF Reader does.
I tried with gallery plugin as a compromise but it works for single elements not for pages, while my pages are composed by multiple img tags (mp3 players and interactive swfs over a pdf2swf converted file). Another problem is that gallery loads another instance of target swf while I need to keep the swf running state.