First Look: Apple's new iBooks Author - Page 3

"I just exported it to PDF because that's the only way to use in on Blackberry and now most of the stuff doesn't work. I'm tired of Apple artificially limiting their products like this."

Yikes. Literally 29 steps. Amounts to fooling the App Store into thinking you are running Lion.

I have bought Lion but for various reasons I choose not too use it on my i5 iMac and my single core MacBook can't run it anyway. There is a very simple hack (takes 15 secs) to make iBooks Author work in Snow Leopard but it seems to me that Apple's philosophy has markedly changed for the worse. When the first iPhone came out it was amazing and it just got better and better as Apple released new things for it, even after the 3G or 3Gs arrived. They introduced FaceTime with the iPhone 4 and made it work with any iSight Mac or even the iPod if it had a camera. We loved Apple because they bent over backwards to make us happy -but not so any more.
First sign for me was when they disabled WiFifoFum - a really useful App that worked well, why would they do that? Then they acquired Siri (which even worked on the 3GS) and made sure it would no longer work on iPhone 4. iCloud could easily work with Snow Leopard or even Windows but no, we need Lion, this means I can't sync with anything that isn't core2duo at least. And now they're blocking iBooks Author which actually works great in Snow Leopard if you change the plist file to let it run. No, it doesn't 'just work' anymore in fact it's just maliciously crippled. They also dropped support for XP in Bootcamp and left many a corporate Mac user high and dry by making it impossible to put Snow Leopard on a new Mac -even though the hardware was identical to one sold with Snow Leopard just days earlier. Grrrrr!

And btw Phil Schiller shouldn't be allowed to present in public, he was dreadful.

Well, as an Apple shareholder, I certainly hope they succeed in cementing iPad's position as the Gorilla of the tablet market, as well as iBooks/iBooks Atuhor as the Gorilla in the book publishing world. It would be Windows Desktop and Microsoft Office redux. I love it. But then combine that with iPhone and iCloud and Siri and iMac and iTV. Wow. You're right; maybe they will dominate the world.

What in the world do you think Apple is "truly interested in"? Do you think this whole iBook Author project was just to sell more copies of Lion for $29.99? Doesn' t make much sense to me.

Breaking news: this software was created to facilitate authors producing content specifically for the iPad, in a proprietary manner, so as to help the iPad become the Gorilla of the tablet market. Your "hope" for something that makes it easier for you to use to organize thousands of pages of stuff for your own use had absolutely nothing to do with this project. Maybe someday someone will make an app for that, but to fault Apple for simply making as you say, "an awsome app" for the intended market and purpose seems kind of odd.

Of course they want to keep it proprietary.

The only reason to not have it proprietary is when you can't get away with it (for example, if Google came out with GoogleAuthor for Android tablets, and it was proprietary, people would only laugh).

Only by having it proprietary does it open the door for helping iPad get a strangehold on the tablet market, just as Windows/Office did with PC's. Without proprietary, you can't get there from here.

Am I missing something? Is this exclusively for textbooks intended for schools?? You can't just publish "your first novel into iBook", as you say? Why not?

Apple does it again. They take something with a tremendous potential, design it from a one dimensional point of view, and force feed you their idea of common sense.

With iBooks Author you are forced to use templates that you cannot override and there are no blank themes. If you chose 'Astronomy" you are stuck with title pages that have a permanent black ghost.

Too bad if you want, say, a white ghost and black text. It ain't possible.

You want a dedication page - a small block of text on a white background? It is possible, but when you go to the table of contents, the screen is filled with drag and drop targets that you do not want. It is ugly and quite nuts, but that is the way it is.

You want a white title page with a simple text block? No can do. You have a black ghost.

This shows no understanding of publishing whatsoever.

Yet again, Apple is acting like a 12-year- old genius who has tons of brains but no wisdom, no common sense, and a serious lack of familiarity with the real world.

Remember the Tom Hanks intros at the beginning of each episode of From the Earth to the Moon? The set is just a bunch of odd shapes until the camera reaches its final position and you see the pieces form a picture of the sun god Apollo. That final camera position is Apple. They put the camera in one position then slide a bunch of pieces into place to make something cool. Don't try to move the camera to see a different point of view, because the whole thing falls apart.

Apple's solution: lock down the camera, because it is impossible to imagine that any other point of view possible.

It is institutionalized insanity. That one free meal that they feed to brand new Apple employees includes a glass of a very strange kind of Kool-Aid.

This is yet another iMovie 08, Final Cut X, and more....

Apple made a number of idiotic changes with various apps that can only be remedied by creatively downgrading to previous versions. The elimination of the "save as" command is a big one.

Some things with Lion are just godawful. I opened an old Keynote project so that I would export a png of a slide. I removed one unwanted element from the slide, did the export and closed it without saving it. The whole operation took around 30 seconds. The next time I opened the file, the item was missing.

I then had to dig through things and open the previous version and then save that.

Why should we have to go through this kind of nonsense? It is because Apple knows best.

This reminds me of Hitler furiously commanding non-existent armies when Berlin was surrounded by the Russians. It is good for Apple to get out of its artificial self-indulgent world once in a while.

From iBooks Author help:

"When you create a book, you begin with a template. A template includes everything you need to create a book: a set of book elements and a variety of layouts for chapters, sections, and pages. Using a template, you can create a professional-looking book with a consistent design across all of its elements. You can modify the elements of any template to suit your needs. If you want to reuse a modified template in the future, you can save the template so that its available in the Template Chooser. If you want to save your template without having it appear in the Template Chooser, you need to save a document."

In Snow Leopard, you would have complained that the unwanted item you removed was still there!

Actually, this feature is so restraining that you can't humanly design templates this way. You'd better code them from scratch. Seriously.
Besides, "save as template" is technically "hybrid". It doesn't save an ibooks author template, it saves a book template. Let me explain to make things clear :

• you have designed a magazine with sections, this feature is great.
• you want to design a template so that others can use them like Apple templates, you're doomed.

In the format > Advanced menu, you got something called "Define object for Current Master" (which happens to become "Update Object for current layout" when your object is defined). This allows you to alter Apple-designed templates in depth. If you don't define objects one by one, pages you'll add in your custom template will "use" the templates of the standard Apple ibatemplate.
In fact, when you're saving a template in iba, you're sort of duplicating your book and making it available in the templates chooser. Custom templates you're saving are not working like standard templates shipping with the app. If you want to make a real ibooks author template, you have to define objects for Master one by one, you can't define a page layout for Master. But there's no logic at all : you can't edit page numbers nor backgrounds, updating objects behaves strangely (sometimes it brings your object back to its original state, sometimes not), you can't get rid of some objects and so on and so forth.
We get used to it since designing templates for OS X apps has always been a pain in the neck. It's never been easy to create templates from scratch, you must edit Apple-designed templates and that's it. No matter the "save as template" feature could be insanely powerful, it has always been restraining. No matter this contradicts the good old "Mac makes it easy to create", which is obviously untrue in this particular case.

As a matter of consequence, if you want to make real ibooks author templates (and not book templates), you have two choices :

• create a blank ibatemplate, which means you'll alter an existing template or code it from scratch and waste days of your life defining each object for Master.
• code templates from scratch and pray they work. Anyone trying to code mail templates knows sometimes it doesn't work and you'll never discover why.

In other words, creating a real template is time-consuming. I thought it would be easy, I was wrong. I thought I could distribute templates so that everyone can use them, I was wrong. Now, I'm coding templates and it will take months to achieve this instead of days because the in-app feature is incredibly limited. And I don't count on Apple to improve it, they have never done this before for other OS X apps….