Hidden headings/links don't work in iBooks?

[Psymon]

Y'all are just jealous -- that's the only conclusion I can come to.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Y'all are just jealous -- that's the only conclusion I can come to.

I'm sorry--jealous of what?

Hitch

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm sorry--jealous of what?

How wonderful and awesome, almost magical, iPads are.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

How wonderful and awesome, almost magical, iPads are.

Sorry, kiddo, but I have one. I have one of those, plus Fires, Nooks, Droids, along with Paperwhites, K2's, etc. There's just nothing that magical about a bloody iPad, and frankly, I find them entirely too heavy to do any longer-duration reading.

I may, on occasion, start off with reading something on an iPad, because I've switched from playing a Word game (although now, I do that on the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga, which is ALSO lighter than the iPad), to reading, but invariably, before 30-45 minutes have passed, I switch up to another device, whether it's an ePUB-reader (Droid, Nook, T-Yoga) or a Kindle (Fire, Paperwhite) for weight and ease-of-use.

And to say I'm utterly underwhelmed with the next-generation of "fixed-format" ePUB3-compliant books for the iPad is the understatement of the year (for me). The slide-effect is just...boring as crap. At least with the page-flip animation, they had something to crow about, along with the pop-up footnotes, which I thought were pretty spiffy. But honestly, the originally-ADE iBooks engine, modified to be all about multimedia, which has ended up being the huge nonstarter that everyone in actual BOOKS thought it would be...meh.

Hitch

[Psymon]

Wow, I can't even make a joke about my being continually berated about my iPad, without getting further berated about my iPad -- not that I'm being berated, of course, but rather the iPad is.

Now I feel sorry for my iPad -- always getting picked on by the others in the neighbourhood. Well, he's my kid, and I love him no matter what anyone else says.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One of these days Alice. Pow! Right to the moon.

To be honest, iBooks really doesn't matter as it makes up a very very small part of the eBook market.

While it may be a small part of the market there are lots of people using it to read ePub and PDF.

Dale

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Psymon

I know, I keep hearing that, but nevertheless it's what I have, what all of my family and friends have, and NONE of them have/use anything other than that -- so we all might be a minority (as far as general statistics go), but in my own life we are certainly the majority.

OUR DAY WILL COME! IPAD SEEN THE PROMISE LAND!

So what you are saying is that your friends and family are sheep and have nothing better then iBooks to use on an iPad. Get them Marvin. Get them Bluefire Reader. Both blow iBooks away and you can actually code without these hassles for your friends and family.

There's nothing wrong with having an iPad except that it comes with iBooks wasting memory and getting the sheep to think that's it for a reading app.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So what you are saying is that your friends and family are sheep

No, that's what you're saying.

and have nothing better then iBooks to use on an iPad. Get them Marvin. Get them Bluefire Reader. Both blow iBooks away and you can actually code without these hassles for your friends and family.

Well, hey, there's an idea -- I'll thoroughly annoy all my family and friends with unsolicited "advice," telling them what "sheep" they are if they don't do what I say, and not do what I say they shouldn't do, and instead do what I'm telling them they should do (in other words, be my sheep), and even if they succumb to my constant insistence and then finally concur that it is, indeed better, then what? Do I then start telling everyone in the world what to do?

I think it would be much, much easier to just design my book in the first place so that it looks fine in iBooks, too. WAY less work and aggravation (on both my part and theirs -- whomever "they" might be).

There's nothing wrong with having an iPad except that it comes with iBooks wasting memory and getting the sheep to think that's it for a reading app.

Um, I don't know of any other uses for iBooks other than as a reading app -- I haven't noticed any games or music or videos or anything else in there (unless they're in something I'm, um, reading).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Psymon

Um, I don't know of any other uses for iBooks other than as a reading app -- I haven't noticed any games or music or videos or anything else in there (unless they're in something I'm, um, reading).

Because it comes with iOS, a lot of people think that it's the app they should be using for reading when they should be ignoring it and installing something else.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Because it comes with iOS, a lot of people think that the app they should be using for reading when they should be ignoring it and installing something else.

Okay, fine, I can see that, but this reminds me of when I was doing web design, especially back in the 1990s and early 2000s (if not still, to this day). Internet Explorer sucks in comparison to other browsers, and yet it's still the number one browser out there -- I don't mean the best, I mean the most popularly used, of course. Although I now use Firefox as my browser, for most of the last two decades I used IE, simply because when I was designing my web pages, I wanted to see what they looked like to most people -- even though, if I could, I would have just gotten all those "sheep" to switch to a better browser.

That ain't gonna happen, though, I'm not going to single-handedly get the whole world (that's using IE) to change -- let alone to upgrade to the latest version (which is a whole other issue/problem). And when I was using IE, I can't tell you how many times I would land on a website that would "remind" me how crappy my browser is, telling me to go download a different one -- or else just not even let me into their site at all until I did, indeed, switch to a different browser.

No, no, no, that's not the way to go about it. It might be fine for "geeks" like you and me, but I can't expect my 80+ year old mom to just up and switch to a new browser, just because some website tells her to -- heck, she'd just be left clueless about what to do, where to go, which browser to choose from.

It's actually nothing but PURE LAZINESS on the part of the designer if they can't design for the "lowest common denominator" -- and doing that, designing for that, for those people and those platforms, is what makes a person a good designer.

That's what makes me a good designer -- and I ain't gonna change that, just because someone says "iBooks sucks."

[JSWolf]

The problem is not designing for the lowest common denominator. It's having to learn to do things in the wrong way to get it to work. That's iBooks for you.

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is not designing for the lowest common denominator. It's having to learn to do things in the wrong way to get it to work. That's iBooks for you.

And that's IE for you, too -- and yeah, it sucks, but you're not going to get ALL the IE users out there to just up and switch, it's an absurd fantasy to think that you will. So either you annoy all those potential readers out there, or you accommodate them -- and usually it's not really all that big a deal to figure out how to accommodate them. Think of it like weighing how much of a relatively minor "annoyance" it would be for you, one person, the designer, to make your book work in that app, compared to the major annoyance it is for the millions of people who think your book sucks, and you suck as a designer, because your book looks so awful in their app (and they don't know any better, they're clueless that it's the apps fault and that they should switch).

Hey, in the end, you can do whatever you want, but as the saying goes... just sayin'.

[eschwartz]

Well, at least as far as web design goes, Google made a pretty good non-techie dialog which got a lot of people to switch to Chrome. (No encouragement for Firefox, alas.)

[Psymon]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, at least as far as web design goes, Google made a pretty good non-techie dialog which got a lot of people to switch to Chrome. (No encouragement for Firefox, alas.)

I know we're getting waaaaaay off-topic here for these forums, but actually, you did get me curious what the most recent stats were re browser popularity, and I was genuinely shocked (not in a bad way) to discover how high Chrome is now, and how low IE has fallen! It's been quite a few years since I did web design for clients, so I haven't really paid much attention in a long time -- but wow, things sure have changed...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_s...f_web_browsers

I've been using Firefox for the last five years or so -- maybe I'll check out Chrome now (which I haven't installed at all, ever), see what all the hubbub is about.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Psymon

And that's IE for you, too -- and yeah, it sucks, but you're not going to get ALL the IE users out there to just up and switch, it's an absurd fantasy to think that you will. So either you annoy all those potential readers out there, or you accommodate them -- and usually it's not really all that big a deal to figure out how to accommodate them. Think of it like weighing how much of a relatively minor "annoyance" it would be for you, one person, the designer, to make your book work in that app, compared to the major annoyance it is for the millions of people who think your book sucks, and you suck as a designer, because your book looks so awful in their app (and they don't know any better, they're clueless that it's the apps fault and that they should switch).

Hey, in the end, you can do whatever you want, but as the saying goes... just sayin'.

It's a minor inconvenience for you, because you are--no insult intended--you are a hobbyist. It's a major inconvenience to the rest of us, because we have to work around the "wrong" ways of iBooks all the time, to try to allow our myriad clients to have books that will work on ALL fronts, even to the extent of making 2 (or now 3) ePUBs for different platforms. That's really not quite the same thing as tweaking code to ensure that it works, however much of a kluge, across Internet Exploder, Chrome, FF, etc. Just a point.

Hitch