Instruction Manuals

Yes please, we could really do with this too!

Ditto on Jsen. Very familiar with InDesign and have been using it for years. I don't know where to begin with Mag+. Adobe Digital Publishing does a much better job with instruction.

Hi,

We are currently working on creating a series of short video tutorials and InDesign examples that will show how to start creating your vertical. We aim to get the series for the first vertical out by the end of next week.

Best regards

Sara

Thanks Sara, but I would prefer a step by step written article. Something that I can print out and have next to me as I'm working. I am also familiar with indesign and i've spent a couple of working days with the mag+ plugin. Things are a bit clearer but i'm still baffled!

Hi Darren,

there will be written instructions as well, following the steps that are shown in the video.

Best regards

Sara

Totally agree,  something you can print and work through would be great. Or if its a video make sure its high enough res to actually see the instruction. like the others ive good InDesign skills but the plug in is really hard to work out properly, there is so much conflicting information in your database too.

Hi Jsen,

Thanks for the input. Do you have the links to the conflicting information? That will give us the possibility to update any wrongful information right away.

We're reviewing our content to check that it is up to date with the latest tool versions, but we are starting with the basic tutorials to then proceed with the tool specific functionality documentation.

Thank you all users for verbalizing my frustrations. I have been working with Magplus for one month. The first week was extremely difficult, as could not see anything in the videos because the resolution was so poor. I work for a large New York ad agency, which is considering jumping on board with this product, and I am the guinea pig. I like the product now, but the instructions/support information is probably the worst I've ever seen. This is affecting my recommendation for this product.

Agreed!

I'm interested in making a magazine and I have In-design experience. However, I cannot, for the life of me get text to show up on top of a box......

A written manual would be great as I don't even know how to insert a moving text box......

I will keep playing (I just downloaded it today and started to play, but even with the YouTube tutorials, the very basics of Mag+ are not addressed.

I'm very much looking forward to using this product!

Concerning the video tutorials. It would be great if speaker tried to speak not so quickly and more clearly. I think "un-english" speaker would be the best choice for those for whom english is not native language. Such audio may be not so expressive but understandable for everybody.

Best regards,

Igor

Hi all,

Thanks again for the feedback. We will shortly release the first tutorials for the basics and we are also working on making the content more easy to find when you are getting started.

If you have specific questions on how to create some of the solutions don't hesitate to ask them in the forum.

Best regards,

Sara

We need a downloadable set of tutorial files and a PDF to follow. Not Video.

Totally agree! All we need is a simple straight forward PDF - mag+ for dummies if you please

Are these manuals available now or a liist of video clips in order...
I am a newbie, and since the update of InDesign 6.0 I am following their tutorials.

I did hope to enter the competition and am running out of time.

I am interested in the book section...

Janine

How are those videos/pdf's coming?   On May 4th Sara wrote the first videos would be out "next week," which has obviously passed.  Did they get posted and I just can't find them...?   A walk-through of the production process would be very, very helpful.  Right now it feels very hodge-podge, and beta-like. 

Are there actual user forums, like for Adobe DMPS?  This would be a valuable resource.

I've been using MAG+ since February and although I have a decent understanding of how it works I get frustrated when something doesn't go to plan. There's nowhere to go to find out exactly why it isn't working and when you finally stumble across an answer in either a webinair, tutorial or Q&A's you wasted a lot of time - and as we all know time is money. 

We're going to be rolling this out throughout the agency later on this year and I'm slightly dreading it as there's no logical written instructions on do's and dont's. I can see what's going to happen, it's going to be me who'll become the manual.

I recently spent some time on a MAG+ stand and a lot of the feedback was that there was no tutorial/manual you could print out and cross reference with.

Any word on the step-by-step pdfs? (thank you all for posting, I was beginning to think this must be sooo simple for everyone but me!)

Sara? Did we scare you away?

I'm jumping in--I also need more help than the videos and the help page can give.  I can't even get the push address to work--I must have spent a whole afternoon just trying to get it to "take" in the box that pops up when the + sign is clicked.  I'm also trying it out for our company and can't move forward.  I sent an inquiry and attached an image of my screen but never got a reply.

Hi, 

Sorry I didn't catch this earlier. 

We do understand that better material is needed and I'm sorry that I, in my optimistic state of mind, promised something we yet have not delivered. 

First of all: If you have a specific issue, posting the question in our Q&A forum is the best alternative.

These are the steps we're taking to remedy this:

• We are reviewing our search engine to see if it is working as we would like. 

• We renamed the Q&A to "Q&A/Support Forum" to make it easier to find. 

• We're working on a better overview and description of the whole production process 

• Design examples in the form of an issue (aka MIB) complete with source files in InDesign,

• Step by step tutorials explaining how to recreate the Design examples mentioned above. 

Apart from creating tutorials, we work on improving the tools. Here it would be very helpful if you could get back to us in this thread regarding which steps you find the most difficult to grasp.

Best regards

Sara

agreed, videos and webinars are great, but written documentation for more advanced users would be very helpful. I have 25 years experience in the industry (print and web) and some features of mag+ are just not very clear from the videos, as sometimes steps are simply missing.

I'm a trial-and-error kind of guy, and for example it was not clear how to get the review app going on a simulator (I figured it out after a bit of googling), but I can see how this gets frustrating really fast for people with little interactive experience.

Ditto the users wanting documentation. Please, guys, get it on paper. Vids are great when you're tooling around and getting oriented. Docs are SO much better when you're in the thick of a problem.

Even a lynda.com type video would be great. I am extremely knowledgeable in InDesign and I haven't a clue where to begin here. We were considering using this as a tool for college teaching but I cannot recommend this to students for the simple fact the tutorials are very poor. Back to DPS for now.

I have to agree the videos aren't very clear and (no offence but) the speech is not clear and for the video on the installation we have a bit of trouble trying to decipher her slang... no offence seriously but for some of us, it was hard to capture. Also we download the 'free' trial one and don't really know where to begin. I just downloaded this plugin sample to give a try last week but only got the chance to use it a few days later and found out that it got expired with 0 days remaining. I think this should be informed at least and it doesn't help as no written manuals are available now. 

Agree with all of the above. Need something written that catalogs all of the features, how to use them, and how to debug them. The trouble with the videos are:

1: you have to see the whole thing and if it still doesn't answer the question you're pissed off.  [excuse language]

2: you can't look through them easily to see if there are features you could be using but didn't know were available.

3: the video does the logical steps that a user would use when setting something up. But in production, we often don't have a linear approach. So far, the most helpful video is the 10 things wrong with Mag+.  [something like that.  Got me out of a lot of trouble in the non-linear process.]

I love it that you are the platform of the future. I can tell you are working as fast as you can to deal with the constantly changing media landscape.  It's the trouble with success: We all expect more and more....  :-)

Sara-

On 4 May you wrote that the first new videos, along with written instructions, would be out "by the end of next week," which means more than a full month late.  On 12 June you listed a bunch of steps you were taking, including "working on a better overview and description of the whole production process." 

Any update on either? It is almost impossible to use Mag+ (or any relatively sophisticated software) with no documentation (and videos on YouTube of varying quality don't really count, sorry).

I count five Mag+ users (including myself) in this thread alone that are either in production or testing Mag+ and unable to proceed--and therefor considering abandoning the Mag+ platform.  Are higher-ups aware of this?  If there are five in this thread alone, we can safely assume there are more who are simply not being vocal about the lack of documentation. Basic documentation should be a TOP priority.

Please don't take this personally: I'm sure you aren't responsible for all that is Mag+, but you are the person representing the company in this Support Forum and so have to deal with our complaints. 

If you're claiming to be out of Beta with this product, there really, really, really needs to be some basic documentation covering the production from start to finish (like Adobe's Digital Publishing User's Guide pdf).  Assuming you've got staff who is familiar with using Mag+, this shouldn't be such a major undertaking.  Is there internal documentation that you can re-purpose?  Or is everything just stored in Mike Haney's head, with the only way to access it through the videos he records off his desktop?    I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, but this is incredibly frustrating.

I'm about one more wasted afternoon away from ditching Mag+ and going back to the straight Adobe solution.  Please stop me.

D

Are thee videos up - we have new designer, and with the release of 3.5, this has left him very confused. Any videos and/or PDF manuals would be immensely useful.

No word on this for almost a month.   Documentation and support doesn't seem high on the list for Mag+.  This is really disappointing as this product has a lot of potential.

I'm moving back to to Adobe DPS.  I'll miss the A-layer capability of Mag+, but there is ample documentation, very active user forums, and great quality video tutorials.

Please let me know when Mag+ gets out of Beta--I'll be happy to try once again.

Good luck Mars, Tana, Collin, Kim, Eric, Marcus, Monette, Carl, Barbara, Mark K., Janine, Hans, Igor, John, James, Laura, Jsen, Darren, Bess and everyone else who has been frustrated with lack of documentation and support.  I'll keep monitoring this thread in case something changes... otherwise, I'll see you all in the Adobe DPS User Forum.

It would be great to have a step-by-step guide for the creation of the App and the provisioning of the IOS portal.  The instructions seem mostly there, but they're not all in order, and it's hard to know what to do first!

Hi guys,

We have had setback on the tutorials. But here's an example of what we are looking to do for all the design examples: http://support.magplus.com/entries/21713167

There's also now a short Step-by-Step on how to get started with the tools. Pointing to the most important articles in our forum for a beginner and also in the appropriate order of learning the tools. http://support.magplus.com/entries/21693096

As Sara has mentioned before, we are working hard to get a better structure on our support articles, we are sorry for the trouble the lack of documentation has caused you. We will have more of these tutorials on how to create the different verticals coming up!

Regards,

Anders