Alan Quatermain

Design & Build a Small Business App: AQGridView

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:09:13 -0500

Design & Build a Small Business App: AQGridView:

A nice little tutorial here on the use of AQGridView on iOS 5.0.

Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate Adoption of EPUB 3 | International Digital Publishing Forum

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 13:48:07 -0500

Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate Adoption of EPUB 3 | International Digital Publishing Forum:

So here’s the Big News to which I’d earlier alluded. The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.

Looking through the project’s goals, you’ll see a good amount of overlap with the goals I’d previously stated for the ePub Author project. The core aims are all there:

A browser of ‘ePub3-flavoured HTML’ content.
A library encapsulating the correct parsing and generation of all forms of structured content described in the ePub3 standard.
Best-in-class support for non-Roman scripts, particularly vertically-flowing ones.
No limits on its use as the core of a larger project, even commercial ones.
Lots of industry know-how being funnelled into a single output.

So yeah: I’m rather excited about this one. Expect to hear more from me as it all progresses.

Now I’ll just go back to writing ePub3 structured content handling code…

baileygenine: People who don’t suffer from depression, won’t...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:15:10 -0500

baileygenine:

People who don’t suffer from depression, won’t understand it, I know I’ve said that a few times, but remember that. (And I don’t say “suffer” lightly, it is suffering. Your whole body hurts, your brain doesn’t work, you’re tired until you try to sleep and then you’re wide awake. You want to laugh, but instead all you can do is cry. You feel like crying and you just get angry, so angry, angry because there is nothing you can do to make yourself feel normal. You do something you absolutely love and you start to feel good and then you wonder why you feel good, you shouldn’t feel good, this isn’t right, you get anxious, you get nauseous, and you cry.)

This.

The effect depression has on me is similar, although it usually manifests in supreme lethargy. That then leads into an inability to concentrate or perform serious tasks, which means that getting worried about tasks and deadlines often leads to an evil soul-sucking downward spiral of doom and gloom.

Many thanks to Bailey for putting this into words.

"Downmarket Genre Fiction" is it?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:42:38 -0500

So the astute Mr. Gemmell earlier today made note of a rather elitist-sounding article over at paidContent:UK. The author of that piece rather laments the fact that eBook consumption is led by ‘genre fiction’. You know— everything that most people read; something — *shudder* — classifiable. Science fiction. Romance. Crime. Horror. Fantasy. Historical.

…

So, is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like regular books? What else could we call them……… Ah yes— stories.

This all smacks of the same sort of book-snobbery we see in some literary awards’ shortlists, or in programmes about books on the BBC. This has prompted a number of authors to call out the organizers and producers of such fare for their low view of so-called ‘genre fiction’. In March 2011, author Stephen Hunt wrote on his blog:

In my world there is only one genre permitted access to the oxygen of publicity in the mainstream media, and that genre is contemporary fiction. It is also called literary fiction by its supporters, just to underscore the point that anything that isn’t written in their genre can never be classed as literature or improving or worthy.

The end result of all this snobbery, he points out, is the loss of the joy of reading in the youth of today. In amidst the many other ways of finding entertainment, the elevation of ‘contemporary fiction’ as the only thing worth reading has turned off many of our youth from reading altogether:

And that conflict, dear reader, between what we read and what is actually covered by the media has sadly begot a much greater one. People, especially younger readers, have given up on fiction on dead trees. They were happy to play the ‘literary fiction’ game in a gentler age, when it was the only game in town. Hell, some crazy old dudes even read short fiction in the pulps back in the day. But it’s a more packed playlist now: MMOGs, IM, BitTorrents, RSS feeds, happy slapping, texting, DS, Xbox, Twitter, FaceBook, iPods, iPads, YouTube, blogging, Tumblr, Angry Birds – you know the drill, right?

I suppose I was lucky in high school that my English teacher didn’t hold to such things— we were specifically encouraged to read fantasy and science fiction; I remember reading Howard Fast’s The First Men there, and many people’s marks took a good boost when writing up that one (we were tasked with writing a newspaper editorial about the experiment in the story).

When reading the article which provoked today’s discussion, I initially thought that perhaps the inflammatory title (downmarket genre fiction) was an addition by the editor, and that perhaps the writer herself had a more nuanced view. However, down towards the bottom were a couple of gems which rather cut short that hope:

The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well.

I’m not so sure it is wise to underestimate the boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public. They may intend to go to the Economist website to read the latest in the euro crisis, but oops! they’ve ended up on Mail Online reading about the Kardashians.

…ok. That’s one way of putting it. Another might be: we read for entertainment, not self-betterment. Most people spend long days working, then most of their evenings working in another fashion: food, cleaning, caring for family. If we choose to spend our leisure time reading, we are more likely to read something entertaining than improving; simple fatigue will dictate that as the norm, if nothing else. Don’t think that it’s all slush, though. Of everything I’ve read in my life, no book has made me reach for the (conveniently built-in) dictionary than Gregory Macguire’s Wicked series. Damn that guy has some vocabulary. And how many other ‘genre fiction’ books — and genre fiction in a fantasy setting, based upon a line of children’s books, no less — would come with study notes included?

The establishment might choose to look down its nose at writing for the sake of story, but its nature does not make it automatically sub-standard.

So there are Great Things afoot for ePub implementors. I have things being planned out nicely, and I...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 11:56:52 -0500

So there are Great Things afoot for ePub implementors. I have things being planned out nicely, and I should be able to make an official announcement & call for contributors in about a week, I think. Specifically anything about the frame layout model of WebKit/WebCore would be very useful to have in about a week’s time.

harkaway: The brain-meltingly amazing trailer for Angelmaker....

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:38:08 -0500

harkaway:

The brain-meltingly amazing trailer for Angelmaker. ‘nuff said.

OMG THE SEXY IT’S TOO MUCH! CAN’T RESIST… MUST … OBTAIN … BOOK…

I have a meeting tomorrow with a big-name company about helping to set up this ePub Author thing,...

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:16:00 -0500

I have a meeting tomorrow with a big-name company about helping to set up this ePub Author thing, following which I should be in a position to start getting a community process together and bringing people into the fold.

…so there’s that.

More on ePub Author

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:04:02 -0500

In the few days since I suggested it there has been a lot of interest in pursuing the initiative. I’ve had contacts from a few companies looking to invest money, expertise, or people, and I’ve heard from a great many people who would love to see just such an application in the wild.

On Goals

I’ve been thinking more about what the aims and output should be. I see a few primary goals:

ePub3-Compatible HTML Renderer: Extend the WebKit platform with concrete support for the special CSS selectors defined by ePub3, as well as some API-level management of optional feature handling (e.g. for epub:switch and epub:case) and triggers.
ePub3 Container API: A clean API for collating data in an ePub3 container. This API would know how to handle optional/alternative content and the generation of index, bibliography, and glossary information. It would also allow for the specification of metadata extensions and extended/customized content data types.
An ePub3 Generator: This would be a user-facing application with support for building valid ePub3 files. It would handle both the correct management of different levels of features and compatibility, and the creation of ePub3-valid HTML5 and CSS content documents.

Other priorities of the above projects would include proper handling of right-to-left and top-to-bottom languages, which currently exhibit some compatibility issues between different CSS properties in the current WebKit builds.

The first two parts would be open-source projects, available to all. The third would presumably have a relatively basic form available as an open-source reference implementation, while vendors could implement their own high-level applications upon the same base. For example, an application similar to iBooks Author could be built on top of the APIs described above.

The whole thing could be dual-licensed under both the GPL and a commercial license, allowing for monetization of the core assets. For example, a vendor with a specific customized feature set might acquire a commercial license to the rendering and generation libraries in order to add customizations particular to their platform.

On Organization

In terms of the expected structure, I imagine a governing body/working group defining the expected output, but only in the longer term. The first and foremost priority would be to develop at least the generator in the short term, with the aim of producing a solid 0.x release to serve as the basis for an official API specification and later 1.0 release.

As regards the group setup, there would obviously be a number of developers putting together the code. These will primarily be folks working for the various interested parties, such as eReader software vendors and eBook distributors. Additionally, we would likely have some means for interested parties to make monetary donations to the effort; this would likely be similar to the rewards system used by Kickstarter, although for various reasons Kickstarter itself is likely infeasible unless some closer-term goals would merit that approach.

On Investment

I’m hoping that a number of publishers and eBook firms will step forward to invest in this effort. The accepted input would most likely be split into different levels based on each donor’s needs from the project. Publishers might donate smaller amounts in exchange for volume licenses to high-quality end-user toolsets provided by vendor donors. The vendors, in exchange for a larger input, would gain commercial source code licenses to develop custom ePub3 generator applications for their individual ePub3 platforms.

This is not to say that we will provide our ePub3 toolkit to form the basis of a non-standard eBook format similar to that utilized by iBooks Author. However, the market thrives on competition, so we do want to let individual vendors compete on the specifications and abilities of their reader platforms; we simply require that they differentiate themselves and their content in a well-defined manner, such that their content can gracefully degrade in other eReaders. Additionally, vendors’ individual directions can better inform any future updates to the ePub standard itself.

Specifically: All output should successfully validate as ePub3 according to the published specification. Any vendor-specific features should be clearly and legally marked as such, and should provide standard-format fallbacks where applicable.

In Closing

I believe that it is an important part of any data format standards process that a toolchain be produced which provides for the users of that format. In this case, I think it is important that ePub3 not only be defined as a standard laid out in copious amounts of hyperlinked text, but also in terms of a demonstration of its implementation. We have seen, in iBooks Author, what happens when one interested party decides to build on top of their own toolkit rather than adopt the new standards. If reference ePub3 implementations had been available in parallel with the definition and ratification of the standard, there might be a significantly different landscape in eBook publishing today.

Let’s set ourselves the aim of providing everyone with a single proven foundation upon which to build; we can then see competition in the market thrive on added-value features rather than who implements which parts of a single well-known specification the best.

ePub Author Coalition

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:18:00 -0500

So a few minutes ago I wrote:

I think there’s enough know-how in the industry outside of Apple to make a competitor to iBooks Author, by which desktop publishing in the eBook age can be as limitless in possibility as we can make it, yet not be restricted to a single target platform. I want to hear from experienced OS X software engineers who are interested in tackling such a project on a commercial (or possibly open-source, or both) scale, and from people companies who can contribute expertise or code to the effort.

I’m already getting a few good ping backs on this, which is fantastic. However, I’d like to enumerate a little more of what I have on my mind:

Engineers

We need engineers who can crank out top-notch OS X code. While I’d normally want to include anyone who’d like to cut their teeth on such an app, this time I think getting something of the highest quality out of the gate takes priority.

Software Development Companies

Apple has a head-start on us. Even if we started coding at the same time they did, they would still have a head-start. This is because iBooks Author is built on the same components used in the iWorks suite of apps, and those components go back to the mid-90s I believe (they were based upon apps originally written for NeXTStep). In order to avoid the ramp-up time in recreating those components, we would be interested in anyone who could either donate or license similar components to us. I’m visualizing the Omni Group’s apps here, for example.

Publishers, Retailers, Distributors, Oh My!

Anyone with an interest in eBooks and a budget to throw around. Particularly those who need to produce, validate, or tweak ePub3 content. How would you like to assist in funding such an effort? What would you like to see? What sort of terms would you like/accept— i.e. open-source free app only, n number of free copies, volume discounts, etc.

For the record: I’ve made overtures to my employer about the above. Although the guy who would likely be able to make anything happen is away in the UK next week, so don’t expect any announcements.

As before:

iBooks Author vs. ePub Author

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:32:00 -0500

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.

HTML5? Or XHTML+XML?

Here’s the top section from an IBA I exported yesterday, reformatted for width:







    
        
        Untitled

Note that the CSS stylesheets are declared using an tag instead of a tag in the HTML header. Also, the content-type tag defines the document as xhtml+xml, where the DOCTYPE clearly defines it as pure HTML5. Interestingly, the only HTML stylesheet link tag actually points to an (empty in my case) SVG file. Wait, what? Is that even legal? No, really, I don’t know— is it legal?

Everything’s Objective

Here’s how it specifies some of its text layout:


    
    
        
        Lorem Ipsum
        
            
                Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
            
            
                Consectetur adipisicing elit, 
                    sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et
                    dolore magna aliqua.
                
            
            
                Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis 
                    exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex 
                    commodo consequat.
                
            
            
                Duis aute irure dolor in in voluptate
                    velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

What’s that at the root there? Why yes, it’s an tag. I may be missing something here, but ePub3 defines the epub:type attribute, and it’s entirely possible for them to render this using

, which is more browser-friendly than an tag, which I believe a browser can choose to ignore if it doesn’t recognize the specified object tag. Yes, the browser, not the ePub Reader platform built on top of that browser.

Keynote

Where this goes further is when you look at the embedding of a Keynote file. First we see this:

Within this chunk there’s a another set of tags similar to those above, this time wrapping the header & footer for the container element, and an tag for the image to show if the above object isn’t displayable.

The interesting part is the data-bundle-path up there. This points to a folder within the IBA container, which has the following structure:

assets.kpf/
- 480x268/
- fallback/
- images-1/
- images-2/
- kpf.json
- player/
- AnimationManager.js
- [lots of .png files, a couple of .gifs for spinners]
- [lots of .js files]
- FilterDebugCode.bash
- FilterDebugCode.sed
- KeynoteDHTMLPlayer.css
- KeynoteDHTMLPlayer.js
- KeynoteDHTMLPlayer.html

So, nothing in there which looks too hairy for a browser, right? What happens if I unzip the container and open that html file I wonder?

That’s right it works. Even all the animations. Perfectly. And it live-resizes perfectly, too.

So, in other words, they could have linked the ‘fallback’ image to this KeynoteDHTMLPlayer.html file to keep it at least broadly compatible with other readers. They could have used followed the ePub3 spec and specified the content in such a way that inline-display-capable readers could render it inline, while others could just go to that page. As it stands, the source .xhtml file won’t render properly in Safari, and even then offers no way to access the Keynote file. Which, itself, is the only part of the document that works perfectly in Safari.

Sigh…

So I’ve yet to see anything in here which couldn’t be output nicely using ePub3. Sure, there are CSS namespaces, that’s fine— CSS defines the @namespace keyword for a reason, after all. There’s SVG in there too, which is also fine. The placement of key layout attributes as proprietary attributes within tags, though, is inexcusable when the ePub3 standard defines great things like the epub:switch element which would enable fallbacks for other readers to display the same content, and the epub:type attribute to specify content types for given tags. The latter could be used to denote things like 3D imagery, infer the encoding or purpose of a video/audio tag, and more— it’s extensible by the content author, and is an appropriate data point for reading systems to use when determining how or whether to render particular types.

So, in summation, it appears that there is relatively little that iBooks Author can output which can’t be output as nicely standards-compliant ePub3. A few things to do with special gutter layouts and so on (which are still only proposed future CSS3 modules) but overall the general content being included could be output just fine.

The next question is, of course: who’s going to make an equivalent ‘ePub Author’ application?

ePub Author

I think there’s enough know-how in the industry outside of Apple to make a competitor to iBooks Author, by which desktop publishing in the eBook age can be as limitless in possibility as we can make it, yet not be restricted to a single target platform. I want to hear from experienced OS X software engineers who are interested in tackling such a project on a commercial (or possibly open-source, or both) scale, and from people companies who can contribute expertise or code to the effort.

You know who you are.

Stanford offering a free Online Human-Computer Interaction course

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:32:02 -0500

Stanford offering a free Online Human-Computer Interaction course:

nikf:

Consider me signed up.

…and what’s more, there’s courses on Cryptography, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. I’ve just signed up the to NLP and Machine Learning, as they’re astonishingly useful in a project I’m working on right now. Not sure if I’ll be doing the coursework or just the read-along version, but dammit I want that stuff in my head right now.

bookshelfporn: The Joy of Books Many sleepless nights were...

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:25:47 -0500

bookshelfporn:

The Joy of Books

Many sleepless nights were spent moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto to create this video.

(via Sarah Moran)

I’m in absolute awe right now.

A 3-Year-Old's Subtraction

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:45:39 -0500

Olivia: I've got three pierogies left, Tata.
Me: You had eight to begin with, so how many have you eaten?
Olivia: Three.
Me: No, how many did you eat, if you only have three left out of eight?
Olivia: Eight.
Me: But how many of those eight did you eat if there are three left?
Olivia: STOP TALKING.

"Bottom-line: the EU thinks the “agency model” constitutes illegal price-fixing."

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:37:10 -0500

“Bottom-line: the EU thinks the “agency model” constitutes illegal price-fixing.”

- John Gruber of Daring Fireball, commenting on this story from CNNMoney.

I’d say the possible reason for targeting Apple in this case is that Apple is also a platform vendor upon which competing eBook retailers wish to build platforms, and indeed have done so, before Apple. Apple’s accused collusion with publishers therefore additionally gives Apple a significant lever against competitors in the eReader app space. Just look at what they’ve done to Kindle, B&N, and Kobo.

Remember: if it weren’t for the Agency Model, all those would have been able to run decently enough via Apple IAP, albeit quite likely with higher prices. Apple eventually decided to allow us to charge more in our app— in the full knowledge that the deals they’d helped shepherd into the publishing industry would prevent us from actually doing so.

Me & my 3-year-old daughter

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:51:19 -0500

Olivia: Father, today we have to go to Chapters and get a big toy animal. A really huge one, like this [stretches her arms out wide], okay?
Me: Well, we shall have to ask Mama first. She's got the car today.
Olivia: That's okay, you can buy a new one if you like, then we can go to Chapters.
Me: I'm not sure about that… it costs a lot of money to buy a new car…
Olivia: Maybe you can look upstairs and find some money there, okay Tata?
Me: *cuteness overload*

parislemon: [T]he reward for all that hard work was simply...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:53:26 -0400

parislemon:

[T]he reward for all that hard work was simply turning the Eye of Sauron on them. Now that Netflix is the incumbent, Hollywood is out to grab the money as they beat the shit of them to assert their command.

The content business is a bitch.

"It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is..."

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:58:12 -0400

“It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.”

- Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance | OccupyWriters.com

How to bring good design to a platform – Marco.org

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:41:11 -0400

How to bring good design to a platform – Marco.org:

HELL. YES.

When I’ve had gripes about an employer or a client, it’s almost always been due to their not enforcing the values in this list.

tuaw: So awesome. Siri, can I get this on an iPhone cover?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 12:56:25 -0400

tuaw:

So awesome.

Siri, can I get this on an iPhone cover?

I don't have a story

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:26:05 -0400

It’s been fascinating to read all the remembrances of Steve Jobs over the past couple of days, and all the inspiring eulogies written by those whose lives he had profoundly affected in some way.

As much as I’d love to, however, I don’t really have any stories like that. Obviously my career would likely not be anything like it is now, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have the sort of community standing I now enjoy. But I can’t really say that I would miss him because of that— I am where I am, and I shall go further, and his presence is unlikely to affect that. I am of course grateful for his role in creating a world where I’ve been able to achieve what I have, but that world is here now.

So, why would I miss him? What, exactly, am I mourning? Because I’m clearly affected by his passing.

After much musing, I think I now know.

Firstly there is a selfish reason: there was so much more I believe I could have learned by watching him. I learn best by watching others, and I’ve paid close attention to Steve Jobs for a long time now. Each decision, each statement, I tried to understand; to walk around in his shoes for a while. Perhaps I wouldn’t agree with him, but I could hardly grow as a person unless I understood why that was, and could justify both sides. The justifications, after all, are what should be compared, not the actions themselves.

So I’m sad that there is little more I can learn from him. He was a good teacher in that regard (and I know teachers, I was raised by them), and so I shall miss all that I’ll never learn from judging his reactions to what happens in the future.

Secondly, I feel like he had great respect for the users of computers. That manifested as his perfection, I think, and I know a lot of people are (or would be) grateful for that. So we respected him in return— what goes around comes around. Therefore, we feel the same loss we would for anyone whom we held in esteem.

So I guess what I have to thank Steve Jobs for is all that he taught me, and the respect he showed to me, and engendered in me, all without even knowing of my existence.

Thank you Steve. Take your rest now, you’ve earned it a thousandfold.