I’ve been messing around with iBooks Author, with a view to a specific project. It’s very cool in fact. Anyway, I’d like to include a ‘widget’ or custom html, that unfortunately isn’t completely catered for in the app itself and I thought some of you erudite chaps here may be able to give me some advice.
This would be for a food book and this is what I want:
A small table to calculate ingredient quantities for shopping, calculated according to the number of people dining. So … it would have the base amount of ingredients to start with, then when the user alters a ‘number field’ the quantities re-calculate to show the appropriate amounts. This list can then be ‘shared’ via the usual iOS tools.
Is this something that could be done easily via HTML5? iBooks uses the widget packages … I think the same as Dashboard. There is also a custom HTML widget in iBooks Author, so perhaps it could just be pasted in there? There is already a table widget, but unfortunately it doesn’t have user editable cells.
I’m not aware of HTML5 being able to perform calculations on its own (I could be wrong). Such functions require a logic-based language such as javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python etc. Though within the context of iBooks Author I suspect javascript is what’s used. And of course CSS, too.
On Mar 30, 2015, at 10:01 AM, grantsymon email@hidden wrote:
I’ve been messing around with iBooks Author, with a view to a specific project. It’s very cool in fact. Anyway, I’d like to include a ‘widget’ or custom html, that unfortunately isn’t completely catered for in the app itself and I thought some of you erudite chaps here may be able to give me some advice.
This would be for a food book and this is what I want:
A small table to calculate ingredient quantities for shopping, calculated according to the number of people dining. So … it would have the base amount of ingredients to start with, then when the user alters a ‘number field’ the quantities re-calculate to show the appropriate amounts. This list can then be ‘shared’ via the usual iOS tools.
Is this something that could be done easily via HTML5? iBooks uses the widget packages … I think the same as Dashboard. There is also a custom HTML widget in iBooks Author, so perhaps it could just be pasted in there? There is already a table widget, but unfortunately it doesn’t have user editable cells.
I’m sort of trawling the net trying to find out how best to do this. What I can’t understand at this point, is how I to make just a single column-header editable, whilst all the rest are not.
I don’t recall what version of ePub the iBooks Author application creates. My understanding is that the (next/maybe current) version of ePub allows JavaScript. I think that’s what’s behind some of the wizzier stuff you can do in the new iBook textbooks. It’s been a long time since I heard anything about this, though, and I am quite possibly wrong here.
Walter
On Mar 30, 2015, at 12:24 PM, Todd email@hidden wrote:
I’m not aware of HTML5 being able to perform calculations on its own (I could be wrong). Such functions require a logic-based language such as javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python etc. Though within the context of iBooks Author I suspect javascript is what’s used. And of course CSS, too.
On Mar 30, 2015, at 10:01 AM, grantsymon email@hidden wrote:
I’ve been messing around with iBooks Author, with a view to a specific project. It’s very cool in fact. Anyway, I’d like to include a ‘widget’ or custom html, that unfortunately isn’t completely catered for in the app itself and I thought some of you erudite chaps here may be able to give me some advice.
This would be for a food book and this is what I want:
A small table to calculate ingredient quantities for shopping, calculated according to the number of people dining. So … it would have the base amount of ingredients to start with, then when the user alters a ‘number field’ the quantities re-calculate to show the appropriate amounts. This list can then be ‘shared’ via the usual iOS tools.
Is this something that could be done easily via HTML5? iBooks uses the widget packages … I think the same as Dashboard. There is also a custom HTML widget in iBooks Author, so perhaps it could just be pasted in there? There is already a table widget, but unfortunately it doesn’t have user editable cells.
iBooks is Apple’s own take on the ePub format. I think it respects the ePub format, in as far as it goes, but adds some extra stuff to enable touch gestures and perhaps some of their maths stuff.
I’m wondering now though, if I can:
1/ make a simple table in FW, with an editable cell
2/ open my FW page in Safari
3/ select my table and open in Dashboard
Wouldn’t this turn my table into a Widget? I could then drag that widget into my iBooks Author file?
Would this turn FW into a cool wysiwyg widget maker?
