iBooks Author - Part 1

The third and final part of the iBooks Author tutorial series. iBooks Author is Apple's brand new eBook authoring application.

Previously a hugely complex operation, iBooks Author has simplified the process of creating beautiful, interactive eBooks for publication on the iPad. Extending and enhancing the capabilities of eBooks, iBooks Author makes ebook authoring available to everyone with a Mac and Lion. Best of all, it's free!

This third part of the iBooks Author tutorial finishes covering the new interactive widgets as well as finishing up some loose ends, and reviewing the various ways to export, share and sell your eBook.

The full tutorial includes sections on:

• Interactive Image Widget
• 3D Widget
• HTML Widget
• Creating LInks
• Managing a Table of Contents
• Creating a Glossary
• Exporting & Publishing
• Publishing via iBookstore

Part 2 of the iBooks Author tutorial series. iBooks Author is Apple's brand new eBook authoring application.

Previously a hugely complex operation, iBooks Author has simplified the process of creating beautiful, interactive eBooks for publication on the iPad. Extending and enhancing the capabilities of eBooks, iBooks Author makes ebook authoring available to everyone with a Mac and Lion. Best of all, it's free!

This second part of the iBooks Author tutorial introduces you to creating and configuring the new interactive widgets to turn your eBook into a fully interactive experience.

The full tutorial includes sections on:

• Shapes, Tables & Charts
• Adding Shapes
• Adding Tables
• Adding Charts
• Adding Interactive Elements
• Interactive Photo Gallery
• Adding Interactive Media - Audio
• Converting Audio in iTunes
• Adding Interactive Media - Video
• Interactive Review Questions
• Adding Keynote Presentations

Apple still haven't fully released all the components of iCloud for its own applications. Most notably, 'Documents in the Cloud' is great on iOS but iWork on the Mac doesn't fully support it yet.

Beating Apple to the punch is iA Writer, a simple text editor that has just been updated with 'Documents in the Cloud' support, to seamlessly work on documents on your Mac and on your iPad. This tutorial explores how this new and exciting feature has been implemented on the Mac.

This tutorial also features a rather unique and innovative way to provide remote iPad support using iCloud and Apple TV of all things!

One of the biggest disappointments with the iCloud launch was the lack of an updated version of iWork for the Mac, that fully embraced 'Documents in the Cloud'. This is Apples new service (part of iCloud) that allows applications to seamlessly share documents stored in iCloud.

At the time of writing, only iWork on iOS fully supports this feature. Create a document in Pages on your iPhone, and it appears on your iPad, available for editing. However, if you have Pages on the Mac, you have to fire up a web browser to access the file - not ideal. We had hoped that Apple would release a new version of iWork to fully support iCloud, but no sign as of yet.

However, that hasn't stopped third party developers from updating their Apps to take full advantage of iCloud. Several apps have now started to use iCloud syncing to keep settings in sync, but one of the first to support 'Documents in the Cloud' has just been updated. The application is iA Writer by Information Architects. This is a minimalist text editor, ideal for working with Markdown, which has both a Mac and iPad client. You can now move documents to the cloud using iA Writer and seamless edit them from either device (no iPhone app at the moment unfortunately).

As it is one of the first apps with this feature, I was intrigued to see how they had implemented it, and if it may be a good sign of how all apps will behave in the future. I thought you would be interested too!

So in this episode, I skip over the main features of iA Writer (there aren't that many as it is very minimalist), and focus on how it creates and handles documents on the Mac and the iPad. I'm very encouraged by how useful 'Documents in the Cloud' looks although there still are some issues to be ironed out based on this first implementation.

Take a look and see what you think.

Supporting an iPad Remotely via Apple TV

I also include a section inspired by an email from a ScreenCastsOnline viewer (so sorry I can't give them a name check!). Now that we are in the 'Post PC' era, and along with the advent of iOS5, it's perfectly reasonable that people may be using iPads as their sole computer. Perfect for family members with no heavy computing needs. Give a iPad 3G to Granny, and she can email, surf the web, etc,.

Which is great, but invariably, we sometimes get sucked into supporting remote family members. Sometimes difficult on the Mac, even with the abundance of remote support tools, but what about the iPad?

This section shows you how to support a remote iPad with just iCloud and Apple TV. Absolutely brilliant!

The iPad really came into it's own on my recent trip to WWDC. Two seven hour flights, each way, gave me plenty of time to watch a few films and write a few documents and blog posts. Even though my 13 MacBook Air is lightweight and portable, it's still just a bit too big to sit nicely on the seat tray in Economy (or coach to our US friends).

The iPad however, is just perfect.

I've been looking for the perfect writing app for the iPad for ages, and must have tried everyone on the market. There always seemed to be just one or two features missing. I'd settled on the strategy of using plain text files, formatted using the Markdown language as the perfect solution for portability. Files created on the iPad could be whisked across to my Mac without any worries of cross application incompatibility. My search seems to have come to an end with Writing Kit for the iPad.

Writing Kit has full support for DropBox allowing you to seamlessly transfer your file to your Mac. A dedicated keyboard takes away the hassle of trying to remember Markdown commands or fighting with the standard keyboard to access symbols and other characters. A good selection of fonts, resizable with a pinch or the fingers as well as a unique way of moving your cursor, character by character, or word by word with just a few taps. Working on a long document? Writing Kit also allows you to view an outline of your document and jump to any heading quickly and easily.

Want to create blog posts with images from your camera roll? Writing Kit has integration with CloudApp, allowing you to select an image, upload to the cloud and insert an image link in a single process. If you're using Writing Kit to create a document requiring research on the net, it's built in research tools and browser means you can do everything within the application - no need to keep switching back and forth with Safari. Once you have your quote, link or image from the web, Writing Kit allows you to paste them into your document with just a few taps, all correctly formatted and annotated. There's also integration with services like InstaPaper, Evernote, Delicious, Pinboard. . too many to mention.

This week's tutorial takes you through all the main components of Writing Kit, demonstrating many of it's features.

This week’s show features one of the “go to” applications for serious writers and authors - Scrivener 2.0.

However, if you’re not a writer or an author, never fear, Scrivener 2.0 is a complete writing studio, suitable for many different writing tasks. Scrivener 2.0 has an amazing depth and breadth of functionality and includes many different tools in a single application.

It’s a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner, text editor and many more tools, all rolled into one.

Any project that requires collecting research notes, ordering and sorting ideas, shuffling index cards and producing edited text, will benefit from the rich functionality of Scrivener, so be sure to check out this week’s free show.

Scrivener 2.0 adapts to how you want to work, and is designed to “get out of your way”, and let you focus on creating your text. It includes tools such as the fully customisable Full Screen View, the extremely useful split pane view and also the new Quick Reference windows and Scratchpad, to optimise your writing experience.

With rich support for collecting and viewing research information in the form of text, PDFs’ images, even audio and video, Scrivener lets you keep all your related information in a single project file.

Once your text is created, Scrivener is fully loaded with tools to help you sort, organise and refine your work. Organisational tools such as the unique “Scrivenings” mode, allowing you to view and edit separate sections of your documents in a single “composite” view, as well as a CorkBoard view, helping you visualise, sort and edit your text as moveable Index cards.

Scrivener 2.0 also includes a highly customisable Outliner view. You can customise all aspects of Scrivener 2.0 to fit in with your preferred way of working.

Scrivener 2.0 also protects your work with an auto save feature, automatic backup, as well as the ability to save “Snapshots” of your work as you progress, allowing you to compare versions and rollback when needed.

Once you’ve competed your document, Scrivener 2.0’s powerful Compile feature allows you to export your document in a huge number of formats as well as allowing you to completely re-format your documents in line with many leading industry standards.

This 35 minute tutorial takes you through the basics of Scrivener 2.0 and explains the core concepts and features in a simple, easy to follow way. As well as the basics of Scrivener, I also touch on some of the more advanced features with tips and hints on how you can explore Scrivener further.

A slight departure for this week as I'm covering an application that's been out for a considerable time, in fact, one that might even be upgraded in the very near future!The application is the word processor and page layout application from Apple - Pages'09.

Pages '09 is part of the iWork '09 suite of applications (packaged along with Keynote and Numbers) and is an essential purchase for any Mac user.

I've previously covered Pages before (SCO0049 - Basic Pages and SCO0142 - Pages '08), but I can't believe I've never covered the current version of the application, something I really needed to put right before the next version appears.

So in this week's show I cover some of the updated and enhanced features of Pages '09 such as:

• Introduction to Pages 09
• Full Screen View Styles,
• TOC & Outlining
• Paragraph Styles
• Creating a Table of Contents
• Dynamic Outlining
• Mail Merge Address Labels
• Citations & Formula Support
• Creating Citations
• Inserting a Formula

Finishing off the trio of shows all about iWork '08, this weeks show brings you up to date with the newly revised Pages'08, Apples flexible, yet powerful, word processor and page layout application.

Addressing the major complaints about Pages'06, mainly that it wasn't a ""proper"" word processor, Apple have completely revised Pages '08 to include a brand new ""word processor"" mode, in addition to its original page layout mode.

To make it even easier to use, Apple have also introduced the context sensitive format bar in line with the other iWork applications to allow for less reliance on the inspector panels and give you control of the common elements right within the application window itself.

Finishing off the trio of shows all about iWork '08, this weeks show brings you up to date with the newly revised Pages'08, Apples flexible, yet powerful, word processor and page layout application.

Following on from the previous show I did on Pages '06 (nearly two years ago!), this show will bring you up to speed on lots of the new functions and capabilities of this outstanding package!

This weeks show is a free show, but there is an extended show available for ScreenCastsOnline Extra! members with an additional 10 minutes of content and chapter marks. Extra! members will receive the extended show automatically as usual.

The show covers:

• Introduction to Pages '08
• Using the Format Bar
• Paragraph, Character & List Styles
• Page & Section Breaks
• Tracking Changes in Documents

The Extra! members extended show also covers:

• Working with Images in Pages
• Instant Alpha
• Wrapping Text around images
• Masking Images and Picture Frames
• Text Flow in Page Layout Mode
• Exporting