Full disclosure: Rich Tretola works for Herff Jones and I work for EffectiveUI, but neither of us had any real involvement in this application.

Today Herff Jones announced the launch of a robust new RIA for creating and editing yearbooks online. The application is called eDesign, and it lets teachers and students collaborate in real time through a fully functional and very powerful layout and content creation tool. Herff Jones is one of the nation's leading yearbook printing and distribution companies and developed eDesign to give schools a better tool for creating yearbooks. eDesign was developed by Herff Jones in conjunction with a team of developers from EffectiveUI.

I took eDesign for a test drive recently and was really impressed by the sheer number of usable features the team was able to implement. Imagine Adobe InDesign done exclusively for yearbooks and you have a pretty good idea of how eDesign works. It features a fully functional layout tool with all of the tools you'd expect and implements "in place" editing with a smoothness most editors lack. It allows users to organize their content in ways required for the yearbook industry (pages, spreads, etc.) and gives them complete control over the way their content is displayed. It features a robust WYSIWYG editor that makes it easy to create new content and edit your existing pages.

When users log in, they're greeted with an intuitive dashboard showing the status of the content they're responsible for. They can send and receive messages related to respective spreads and see an intuitive horizontal thermometor indicating the state of the pages they've been assigned. Sticky notes and all other "To do" type messages applied to any element of the book appear in this dashboard, making it easy for users to keep track of what others have said without having to flip through every one of their assigned pages.

The eDesign dashboard

The top level book editor. A user can arrange the pages in a number of different ways in this view including the logical spread view, by colors used on the page, named sections, staff members assigned to the page, etc.

Editing a spread in eDesign

The eDesign content uploader. This screen displays the images currently available in the book, but other classifications of graphics (pop-ins, art, templates) can be uploaded, sorted, and displayed here as well. The tool tip on the image displays which pages the image is currently being used in.

Probably the single most impressive feature is the way eDesign handles text. The application targets Flash 9, so it can't take advantage of the huge improvements in text handling that Flash 10 provides. It's obvious that a lot of time was spent specifically on text - as any good developer will tell you, managing dynamic text in Flash 9 is a difficult task. The result is an application that handles complex text arrangements without distorting the letters and dynamically loads a wide variety of fonts (around 350 come packaged with the application) without reducing performance.

eDesign also has some really great permissions features that show a high level of understanding of the complex use-cases around yearbooks. A number of different roles can be assigned to each user and allow book administrators to lock pages after they've been edited or prevent student editors from even knowing some pages exist.

Managing user roles and permissions

It's a little strange to say, but I was also really impressed with the help page for this application. Most applications strive so hard to be usable that they don't bother with a help page. While usability is certainly important, no application with any significant level of complexity is going to make sense to everyone all of the time. It's nice that Herff Jones put in the time and effort to style and brand the help page. It feels like a usable tool rather than something they threw together at the end.

The eDesign help page

All in all, I'm very impressed with this application. It's one of the most complex RIA's I've seen yet, but it's also one of the most functional and complete. The only question I have about eDesign is wether there's a desktop version in the works - currently it's locked in my browser and subject to the performance and memory restrictions that entails. While the browser provides a level of ubiquity other delivery platforms don't, the growing penetration of Adobe AIR and use of the common Flex code-base make an AIR app seem like a logical next step. It seems like the performance would improve and the usability would also benefit from features like the ability to drag and drop content from the desktop directly onto the book.

For more information, check out the eDesign homepage or EffectiveUI's microsite.

Read more from RJ Owen.