What is Missing in Apples iBook Author?
January 26, 2012 | 
Author Adobe Flash.
iBook Author got a lot of fan fair last week with many trial software runs.Ye Editor happened to witness one – 5 things stood out about iBook Author:
1)It is simple and fairly easy to use given this simplicity;
2)It can turn out large iBooks but they are huge files about 1.3 GB for a 1oo page 10 large “animated” illustrations;
3)it can be slowwww at times in design and creation;
4)it does not have advanced and compelling animation features familiar to Erain Swift3D [Mac, Win] , Toon Boom Animate [Mac, Win], SwishMax [Win], Anime Studio [Mac, Win], as well as Flash CS5.5 [Mac, Win] developers;
5)As usual of late from Apple, it is highly proprietary and turns out proprietary iBook files
Again, for animation Apple Quicktime is found wanting and iBook is no exception. HTML5 is not a viable solution and in fact Apple simply does not have a replacement for Flash for its millions of designers. Yet Apple’s case against Flash is highly suspect. iBook Author just underlines the case of deficient products being provided to loyal Mac graphic designers and developers when many products much better are available.
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Apples Educational Annoucement in NYC:Update
There is a 2 in 5 chance of this. If CEO Time Cook does not do the announcement at today’s conference then the odds plummet down to 1 in 100. But it would be a brilliant “one more thing”, certainly fit the educational move Apple is making and gain for Tim Cook a large measure of the Steve Job’s magic if Tim, just before the end of the conference, announced “just one more thing”, an aspect of the upcoming iPad 3 – perhaps the retina display and how it is geared for the new Apple iPad educational future. If ye Editor is right remember I have a patent on the idea.
Well Marketing VP Paul Schiller showed up and the 99% won this time – no iPad3 news, no Tim Cook finesse.
Now for the substance. Apple announced a new textbook format and a new iBook 2 app for viewing them and a free Mac iBook Author program for creating the iBooks. The buzz on the iBook Author App is that it is easy to use for putting together a textbook using prepared text [avoid iBook Author text editing is the word here], images, videos, but of course no Flash animations, JavaFX or Gif animations. Instead users will have to resort to more sophisticated JavaScript, HTML5, etc. No word on PDF resources. Also the iBook2 format only displays in iPad not iPhone nor iPod Touch. and not Android. As well iBook Author works only in Mac OS – so iBooks is quite proprietary.
iBooks Author – free tool for creating iBooks on Macs
Nonetheless, no can argue that the goal of interactivity is good; but with some of the best interactive animation tools thrown to the sidelines [no GIF animations, no Flash, no Java or JavaFX] users will have to see what finally filters through beyond HTML5 SVG/Canvas animations or jQuery and JavaScript+CSS3 animations. Maybe one of these technologies currently languishing will take off with the help of iBooks
For these textbooks Apple takes its 30% cut from authors but free textbooks are allowed. But all textbooks, free or maximum of $14.99, must be approved by Apple before they can appear in the iBookStore. Given the huge prices for textbooks and the many scholars looking for income, this is a big low hanging fruit opportunity for Apple to again do some lucrative “Creative Destruction”. Here is a good summary of the trade-offs spelled out at iLounge:
There are only four hitches—for now. The first is device compatibility. While iBooks 2 runs on all iOS 4.2 or newer devices, the new interactive textbooks are only supported by iPads—iPhones and iPod touches will sync and display the books in their libraries, but will refuse to run them. Second is publisher support: this new textbook initiative is currently backed by several large and small publishers, but a big one—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—has nothing in the store now. The third issue is regional: these digital textbooks are only being offered to U.S. customers as of now. Fourth and finally, these new books can be large. The smallest one we’ve seen clocks in at 349MB, with the largest at 2.77GB, so huge that 16GB iPads might struggle to hold a full semester worth of books at once. Based on history, we’re confident that Apple is already taking steps to address all of these issues now, with future updates planned to remedy them.
Missing from this list of cautions are two other caveats. First, iBook 2 ability to incorporate other media and objects like Photoshop PSD with layers, Microsoft XLS, PPT, and WMP; AutoCAD and other 3D formats – are all a mystery. Second, will a next generation of of iBook2 or iPad3 and iPhone 5 be required such that in a 4 year college term users will have to update their software, books, and/or iDevices to make them all work? Apple is infamously Creatively Destructive – just ask Mac Motorola 68000, Mac Power, Mac Intel users[lusting for full touchscreen capabilities] and Mac Flash users/authors – and sometimes very unfairly so.
So the reaction in the Tech Press was surprisingly wide:
Engadget - Apple’s iBooks 2 e-textbooks pack tons of info, take up tons of your iPad’s memory
Gizmodo – You Can’t Afford Apple’s Education Revolution
NYTimes – portrays the business opportunity vis a vis high cost textbooks and support in some universities and educational districts
TechRadar - ” app is obviously free but individual textbooks will cost a bit. Oh, and there’s the added of cost of an iPad – so we’re guessing this is one education for the middle class and privileged.”
theVerge - iBooks Author restricts all sales to iBookstore, wraps for-pay books in DRM
ZDNet – Ed Bott is really disturbed by the iBook Author EULA and other aspects of the iBook ecosystem
Ye Editor tends to agree with some of the above. The worry about the size of the textbooks [as big as 2.5GB] can be dealt with by means of a USB/Thunderbolt port on iPad or just expansion of to new, faster 64 and 128GB modules which Apples investment Flash Bit manufacturer should provide. As for the 500-600 cost of the iPad – that may come down dramatically with the annoucement of the iPad 3 in 2 possible way. A 7″inch screen iPad at $300-350 or the new lower price for the iPad 2. The real problem is the continuing trend towards Apple proprietary – IBook Author for Mac only. The limited set of media and other imports into iBooks Author. iBook 2 only runs in iOS and only on iPad so far. It is a continuing proprietary trend by Apple that may just go away as iBook matures. And then again, it may not.
Year Ahead in Client Computing I
Robert Scoble said this at the BBC Year-end Technology Forecast about client computing:
On the train here I was with an executive from General Electric, and he said a year ago they were very anti-iPad. But in January at their global meeting they’re going to hand out iPads. It is crazy to think about a company that size moving that quickly… the enterprise world is going iPad very quickly.
I wonders if Microsoft can stop Apple ‘taking over the world’? Next year it’s going to be interesting – can Microsoft keep its global position in terms of operating system and stop Apple from taking over the world? And Amazon, because Amazon has the £200 tablet. For consumers it’s going to be a tough choice – do we buy a Windows 8 tablet, or an iPad, or an Amazon tablet?
Ye Editor replied this:
If tablets turn in on themselves with huge computing power, great screens, and convenient dockability like in Asus Transformer Prime or the Windows 8 dockable tablets – then a)GE will have gone iPads too soon, b)Linux in Android form will be a player in client computing like never before and c)if Windows 8 does not stumble like Vista on reliability, the Windows monopoly will be broken but not humpty-dumptied as 3 major vendors compete tooth and nail [and patents] for leadership of the Post-PC era of new client computing. See here.
Like what is happening in social media with Facebook, Google + , Twitter and a dozen others – when there is competition the market innovates at a crazy pace. But client computing has suffered the Windows monopoly for 20 years and now Apple iOS is making a patent war stab to secure that position going forward. Lets hope they don’t succeed.
Adobe’s New Mobile Apps
Adobe has had to make some wrenching decisions of late. It has chosen to abandon its Flash player technology on Mobiles. It has also closed down it Flex development by releasing Flex to Open Source much like HP did for webOS. Adobe appears to be trying to see if they can get freebie development and support for Flex. These two decisions have a major negative impact on Adobe’s AIR technology that requires a vibrant Flash/Flex development activity – but no presence on mobile client OS does not bode well for AIR. This Adobe decision in turn has to effect all the corporate shops that were developing in AIR as the most promising cross platform tool for the desktop and mobile platforms.
Now Adobe appears to embracing a rapidly evolving client computing and software development world of 3-4 isolated islands of computing – desktop, mobiles, cloud-powered consumer, and server based systems. Cross platform is only at the highest and least threatening level for the OS vendors – HTML5. So Adobe is committed to HTML5 development at the expense of Flash. Now with its new Mobile Apps the other shoe drops. Adobe is confronted with developing on at least 5 incompatible platforms – Mac, Windows, Linux,
Note that Adobe’s first six touch Apps are available on Android first [giving substance to Google's Eric Schmidt who said this would be happening in 2012] and on iOS at some “Notify Me ” future date. But of even more import is that Adobe has had to do 2 other things – 1)Break up its Brobadingnangian Photoshop-leading desktop suite into a series of subapps [ Proto, Debut, Collage and PSTouch give parts of the Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign experience] and 2)price those apps at 1/10th of what the desktop programs sell for. Adobe currently unifies this development through its Adobe Creative Cloud and some file exchanges. But clearly how all the new mobile creatives fit together will be an ongoing learning experience for Adobe. In sum, along with monthly rates for key Creative Suite programs, Adobe is beginning to both design and price for a new era in Post-PC client computing.
Goofle Gmail Fixes
Goofle is the name ye Editor has given to Google when it makes a big, stupid error in it software offerings. Google has made a big deal of its recent interface updates to Gmail. But they have have been legion with goofs very large and unnecessary and raise the question where is interface guru MM when needed. My pet peeve is that many buttons that were labeled with commands like reply, archive, forward, etc have been replaced by obscure icons so I am never sure what service I am getting.
Likewise simple editing capabilities that are available in other online mail services like Mozilla Thunderbird `s ability to insert images into a email body or add a complete styling template are not available or only accessible through an obscure, undocumented gmail lab settings. Yet TinyMCE , post editing tool used in WordPress and many other online document editors, provides many of these features . The other problem is that Help is almost nonexistent for many of Google’s online offerings. Now this maybe because some services are still classified as still beta after several years on the market. However, just as a check- look for help in Google Finance, Google Gmail, Google+, and/or Google maps. Yep, you get Help by osmosis or googling for it.
And Alexis Madrigal, editor at the Atlantic, raises the issue of space war conflict between Gchat and Gmail editing at the same time.
Again an accordion or tab Gchat widget that becomes a side-by pane lis one of many obvious Web 2 solutions to this problem. the big Goofle is that as Alexis points out, Google`s interface design engineers did not think this through. And so once again, Google looks inferior to Apple in the `make it so with good design` world that is on the forefront of the mobile computing world.