Ipad Skin

[Murray Phillips]

The Premium Pack includes an iPad skin. This is quite a basic question, but am I right in assuming this is for use when publishing to Web help to improve the experience of users accessing the material via an iPad with Safari?
If this is so, on a Windows PC you can have the content located locally in a folder and access it via a browser. Is anyone aware of some iPad App which allows content to be stored on the iPad and viewed via a browser?
In a recent post a user asked about toggles not being active in epub documents, Tim explained that this is due to limitations in the pub format, I assume that this applies also to videos which are embedded in helping manual with the Lightbox option selected? That is to say all videos play within the bounds of the image which appears in the document?

Thanks as always

Murray

[Tim Green]

Hi Murray,

The iOS operating system is very restrictive about local data. There is no normal way you can save webhelp on the iPad and view it with Safari. App developers may be able to do this for their apps, because they would then be able to use the Safari web engine on the iPad to view web pages that they store in their own space, but I'm not 100% certain of that. You'd need to ask on an iPad developer forum.

[Murray Phillips]

Thanks Tim
One thing I have noticed with the iBooks system is that it does recognise links but it doesn't seem to have any equivalent to the HTML help browser "back" button. There may be some equivalent but it is not clear to me. If you select the "Contents" from some point in the book, there is "Resume" button that will take you back. But as best I can figure the links placed by the author in Help and Manual will take the reader in iBooks to the desired location but iBooks then abandons them there. If this is the case it does strike me as being a reasonably significant issue as the clever use of links is one of the things that makes computer-based help superior to hard copy. Given that users will typically be studying one main topic, and use a link to temporarily look at another topic, they will usually want to return to the place from whence they came. The absence of a back button could make this a rather challenging task. Am I correct in assuming there is no "back" button alternative?

Murray

[Tim Green]

Hi Murray,

There are Back and Return options in iBooks but for an Apple product they are amazingly unintuitive -- I think this was another of the instances where Steve Jobs' and Jony Ives' design obsessions took precedence over functionality. After following a link, if you look down in the left corner of the page you will see a tiny piece of text in very light-colored type saying "Back to page xxx". Tapping there will return you to the page you came from, and this works for search and numbered page jumps and your own bookmarks as well as hyperlinks. Similarly, once you return again, you can then return to the last place you jumped to with the matching "Go to page xxx" tap area in the bottom right corner.

It's quite usable once you know about it, but you have to know about it.

[Murray Phillips]

Thanks Tim that's fixed it!, my sample iBook looks and works fine now. I did look at the downloadable iPad documentation, and a chapter on books does not seem to mention this feature. I also bought a book called iPad at Work by David Sparks, this is an excellent book but it too fails to mention this feature.
All I have to do now is reload all my videos in Mp4 format. I still wish to retain the Flash format for the HTML help output,I was planning on using be "Conditions and Customised Output" features and maintain two copies of each video clip and have conditions set up so that I can publish with flash to HTML and with Mp4 to iBooks, is there anything I should be aware of or is this just a simple matter of applying the conditions to the media and setting the appropriate conditions at publish time?

Murray

[Tim Green]

Hi Murray,

Conditional text should work fine for that, that's exactly the kind of thing it is good for. Just make sure to enclose the entire video object and any related variant text for each version in the tags, then you're good to go.

By the way: I just got my iPad 3 a week ago and it totally rocks... The only problem is that all my other computer screens now look like total crap.

[mwyatt]

After following a link, if you look down in the left corner of the page you will see a tiny piece of text in very light-colored type saying "Back to page xxx". Tapping there will return you to the page you came from, and this works for search and numbered page jumps and your own bookmarks as well as hyperlinks. Similarly, once you return again, you can then return to the last place you jumped to with the matching "Go to page xxx" tap area in the bottom right corner.

Tim, in our published .epub book this "back to page xxx" appears at times but not consistently. We have about 100 links throughout the book and I'd say half work. They are more towards the front of the book. We used the H&M feature of clicking and dragging the text to the relevant header to produce the hyperlink. The links work but the "back to" is missing on many occasions.

Thanks,

Mary

[Tim Green]

Hi Mary,

Tim, in our published .epub book this "back to page xxx" appears at times but not consistently.

This is something you need to contact Apple about. We have no control whatsoever over what their reader program does or doesn't do...