In Design CC 2014

My target for the holiday period is to finish at least one of the children's books I have in development hell.
The biggest issue was that iBooks author is a bit rubbish for creating static layout books, and when it does work it insists on using templates with tables of contents, and chapters... great for academic works, not so good for picture books.

Luckily Adobe In Design has an export to a static layout epub3 format, which will work nicely on an iPad, and I'm hoping will upload into the iBooks store with ease (just as soon as it's back from it's holidays)
https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/how-to/ebook-fixed-layout.html

So I did a quick trial adding pictures to pages, and exporting and iBooks on my mac opened it just fine.
I stuck the ePub in Dropbox and opened it on my iPad, and again it worked just fine.

So now I need to examine which images are ok, and which need updating... Which turns out to be a fair bit if I'm critical... If I'm a little more relaxed I reckon there's about 5 pages of proper work, then lots of tweaking.

Authoring in new iBooks

I thought I'd give the new iBooks Author a try on the stack of #24HCD pages.
The interface is much the same, some useful  new templates, and a little more helpful, right up to the point where the publication is submitted... then it's back to the old fun and games I had using the previous version.
I find it strange that even though it insists on an ISO date format, the field to enter the date has no normalisation, it just throws a paddy later down the line.
I guess I should READ the manual... then I wouldn't be surprised that the minimum image size is 1024*768...
ho well..

Tumult Hype iBooks Widgets - preview

Hype is very simple to use, and the export function, and import into ibooks is a doodle. It takes a bit of tinkering to see what is going to go where, and I need to think a little about how the design will change the way I write the book, but basically there aren't any massive issues.
I do need to remember to include a back button on the widget, as it doesn't seem to reset once the action has happened, if it's launched again.
I also need to remove the "built with hype' link as that opens a browser window.

Tumult Hype iBooks widgets

I want each of the pages in my iBook to have a bit of interaction, and it seems a good way to do this is to use widgets. I found a useful "how to" on YouTube, and started following it, only to find that Hype now has a direct export to iBooks widget function. It is useful to view the video to see what constitutes a widget however... not much :)

iBooks Authoring with Ninja Dinosaurs

I've been colouring some of the images I sketched for the iBooks Authoring effort...I'm still not sure what sort of optimisation I need for the book, the screen of an iPad 3 is 2048x1536 pixels... at around 300dpi.. The advice on the apple support pages is to use JPGs, and keep the whole book below 2Gb...Aside from that it seems pretty open to interpretation. So I'm working at around 2048x1536 at 300dpi, RGB colour, and saving at 10 in jpg. This is giving an image size of about 400kb, so for 30 pages of straight book we are looking at 12 Mb... probably double that when I add widgets, which is a sort of ok size I reckon.
I'll have a look at what Sort of size other books come in at, it may be I can save with no compression, or as PNGs?
iBooks Author isn't really set up for building picture books... it wants to have Chapters and sections and table of contents. It seems the way folk have found to get round these issues is a bit of a bodge... but I'm happy to go with that.

...

Sketching a Seadog

I thought I'd test the video on my iPod Touch to see what sort of quality it produces...
This is me sketching Captain Whelk...

iBooks Authoring - Robot Pirates

Up at 6.30 to walk the dog means I've had a good start at sketching the characters in for my iBook.
I've got a number of sketches of the main Ninja Dinosaur, so I spent a short time sketching out the Robot Pirates.
3 nasty seadogs:
Buttery Jack, Captain Whelk and Salty Pete.