We just returned from beautiful Nashville, Tennessee where we presented at the iBooks Author Conference. We’re pleased to share that Tumult Hype was voted the “Best Third-Party Complement to iBooks Author.”
In Nashville we were lucky to meet teachers, animators, and authors who leverage Hype to produce interactive content for their books. A huge thank you goes out to all the presenters, attendees, and especially Bradley Metrock, who spearheaded the event.
There’s @jmfd starting a demo of our HTML widget support at the #IBAconf Learn more: http://t.co/UcG8SUnuq3 pic.twitter.com/JmvyE9yGZb
— Hype (@hypeapp) October 8, 2015
To watch Jonathan’s presentation, there’s an iBook for that, naturally: iBooks Author Best Practices.
iBooks Author in 2015
iBooks Author is a free app for producing iBooks and ePubs by Apple. Using this powerful tool, you can create beautiful iBooks for the iPad and iPhone by dropping in text, images, videos, and anything else you’d like to make a part of your book. It’s a hugely empowering application the gives the power of book production to anyone with a Mac.
As you can imagine, iBooks Author has a huge foothold in education. At the conference we learned about the iBooks Author program at Mercersburg academy, a private school that increased test scores (and lightened backpacks) by producing their own curriculum in-house. The school developed a program to pay teachers over the summer to produce books, which in turn saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks and increased student engagement. Check out a video they produced on the program.
The output from iBooks Author cannot easily be compared to a physical book–you’d be more accurate describing an iBook as an app. Books like ‘Breaking Bad: Alchemy‘ and The Mozart Project, which earned the best iBook of the year award, demonstrate the state of the art:
On the corporate side, the story is the same: iBooks author saves companies time, money, and especially paper. The tool empowers any organization to create updatable training manuals and books that would otherwise fill reams of paper.
How do we fit in?
iBooks Author supports images, video, 3D models, and HTML widgets. The addition of HTML widgets is Apple’s way of saying: “We don’t want to limit you: do what you want in this space.” The HTML widget allows embedding any HTML content and lets you take advantage of all the advanced technologies of Mobile Safari. Because we strive to be the best tool for producing interactive content for the web, virtually anything you create in Tumult Hype can by dragged and dropped into iBooks Author. We work hard to make sure Hype performs well on all touch devices, which in turn ensures great compatibility within iBooks.
Since Tumult Hype also exports video, you can quickly create a high resolution video to use for your Intro Media.
We were blown away by how many people had already taken advantage of Hype for their iBooks, and we left with an impression that the future is wide open for creatives embracing this medium.