Issuu Platform

Last night Issuu released its new platform site for developers, designers, and anyone interested in using the technology.

What can you build on the Issuu platform?

As of now, you can customise the online publication viewer to include your company logo, change the background, modify the buttons, and do pretty much anything to the UI — in other words, infuse it with your own branding. The viewer has already been available, since its very first release, in four different themes: Grey, Grass, White, and Wood. Now you can create your own themes, using a combination of XML and either Adobe Flash or any standard image editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

Moving forward, Issuu will be releasing new UI components and data APIs through the new Issuu Platform & Services site.

Issuu Markup Language

From the manual:

The user interface of Issuu’s online publication viewer is configured using a simple, dynamic, XML-based UI markup language called Issuu Markup Language (IML). Skin libraries in either SWF 9 or PNG, JPG, or GIF format provide the graphics for interface objects, whereas the objects themselves are laid out using IML markup.

What does IML markup look like?

Here’s an example:

<button action="openUrl:http://platform.issuu.com/"
  upState="#PlatformButton_up" overState="#PlatformButton_over"
  downState="#PlatformButton_down"
  toolTip="Issuu Platform &amp; Services"
  left="35" top="18" />

It’s not very different from HTML and other XML-based UI languages like Mozilla’s XUL and Adobe’s MXML (surprise!). If you’re familiar with any of these technologies, you should have no trouble picking up IML.

Is it a general-purpose language? Almost. Currently it’s tied to the Issuu platform, specifically the viewer.

You can learn more from the language reference and the many tutorials available on the site.

Also check out the sample themes (source included).

The Mashable Theme Example

Yesterday, I put together a quick ’n dirty Issuu theme for the popular social networking news site called Mashable. Essentially it’s a customisation of the Crayon theme with some Mashable branding thrown in. The header, in particular, looks exactly like the one you see on mashable.com. It took me 15 minutes to create the theme, an example of how even a person with absolutely no design skill whatsoever can easily customise the Issuu experience for potentially millions of users online.

Mashable actually used the theme in its story announcing the release.

Learn More

You can join the group on Google to participate and interact with other users of the Issuu platform, ask questions, and share your views and experiences with the community.