I had a similar problem...  The sample magazine looks great, and I'm looking forward to the full issue.  The only glitch was trying to view the 3d ad.  I got a dialog saying a viewer was required.  Clicking on it got a screen from Adobe saying no viewer is available for my system.  I'm running a year-old Toshiba laptop with Vista Ultimate.  The Adobe Reader 9 downloaded and installed fine, but the "helper" that came with it for IE is nagging me to allow it to start every time Windows opens.  I don't use IE, and don't want unnecessary programs running, so I killed it.  Now the viewer isn't available.  Is there going to be a way for me to view these 3d components when the magazine comes out?

Thanks

Bill

The viewer for the 3D ad is Quicktime 7 ... Adobe (PDF and Flash) and Apple (Quicktime) have had something of a falling out in recent months. You can try downloading the latest version of Quicktime from Apple ...

But this has been a good lesson for us. The real magazine will use all Flash content, including for the 3D stuff. This way our readers have one player to download (if they don't already have it - most people will already have it) and then life is good.

Having lots of different players involved to view content is annoying - simpler is better, and these days Flash does just about everything. Adobe says some 98% of all people on the internet have the Flash player already installed, so Flash is clearly the preferred rich media player. Since both PDF and now Flash are Adobe, you can be pretty assured they will play well together with ever more power and capbilities in the future.

When trying to open the pdf version, I keep getting an error box that says:

"The file is damaged and could not be repaired."

Any suggestions?

Yes, here's what you need to do - read through this thread and do what is suggested.

Basically, you're trying to read the PDF while it's still in zipped form. You have to EXTRACT it from the zip file (unzip it) before you open it in Adobe reader.

Adobe reader lets you try to read a zipped file, but always reports a bogus "file is damaged" error instead of a more correct, "I can't read a zipped file, silly. You need to unzip it first!"

(Reading PDF using FF3 on XP... works fine).  When clicking on the NCE ad it jumped there OK, but stayed in the same tab.  Having to repeatedly "back" up to return to the mag is kind of a hassle, esp if user does a lot of web wandering.  When it did come back it went to page 1.  Would prefer if the jump-out links create their own tab or window so it's easy to come back to the mag on same page where the original link was.

Jim:

Good suggestion ... thanks!

Zip file extracts just fine and the pdf file works great. If you are using Firefox 3 under Unduntu, do not attempt to open the file in zip or pdf using Firefox, because Firefox does hang.  Save the file locally then open them, it will work great that way! Excellent issue by the Way Joe!

Cheers!

Adam

I set my browser to always launch PDF as an application rather then a plugin. Gets around the problem for me with all PDFs. It loads faster and seems to work better in its own application. Might be a good way to go for other folks who find themselves loading PDFs that hang the whole browser when the load slow.

Chris

Which browser are you using, Chris?

For browsing primarily firefox.

However, I somewhat mis-spoke, its in the PDF program I can set where it opens.

Preferences->Internet->Display PDF in browser

Sorry for the confusion.

Chris

btw- still better to do a "save as" for really big ones.. the advantage here (besides, to me, a better reading experience) is that it loads the data, then launches the application.. where with the plugin, the reader loads, then it starts transferring the data.. which is where I think it gets derailed.