Creative Edge Classroom

NYC & BOSTON, 2012 — Creative Edge Classroom was one of Safari Books Online's first forays into building a software service in-house, after years of outsourcing software development. A small group of us were tasked with taking a look at the existing Creative Edge product (essentially a re-skinned version of the main Safari Books Online site, but with a limited selection of books and videos tailored toward photography, graphic design, and other visual/creative content), and creating a brand new product that catered to the educational market at a college level.

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A small group of us built a product that focused on a few key areas of functionality, as a pilot for future software development inside the company. Creative Edge Classroom provided a way for school administrators to gather custom collections of books and video, organized by course. They would then allow students to access this content, within the context of their assigned courses.

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We built a system that allowed one person to fulfill many roles over the lifespan of their membership: users could move fluidly between being a student, a faculty member, even an administrator, and back to just a regular user—all without having to create separate accounts with different email addresses, or losing their user-generated content such as notes and highlights.

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Users could read directly in the browser, even when offline. Eventually we realized that this was problematic on a number of levels, but the experience of building the functionality gave us a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of browser caching on mobile devices at the time, which we brought to bear when deciding to develop native apps for mobile operating systems.

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Creative Edge Classroom was a pioneer in native EPUB support and presented the user with a clean, uncluttered reading interface, as well as the ability to add notes and highlights to their books. Users could also upload their own PDFs and EPUB files to supplement our content with their notes and syllabi.

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