James Andrews

Today I was browsing through my tweeps when I saw that @liza had an announcement. A project she’s been working on for some time has come to life, and is viewable for all too see. This project is Ibis Reader, and HTML5 based ePub reader, which allows you to read ePub applications on any mobile devices who’s browser supports HTML5.

I decided to take it for a test drive. I grabbed my iPhone was went to Ibis Reader where I was redirected to the mobile version, and to where I was given instructions on how to setup Ibis Reader on the iPhone. One of the things it asked me was if it could use 50MB of storage on my phone. I agreed, and next I found myself in an area where I could browse books. I scrolled through a couple pages until I got to one called “Japanese Fairy Tales”. I’m a big Nipponophile (Japanese nut), so I decided to grab that, and start to read.

The interface is very simple. touch the right side of the screen and you advance a page, touch the left side of the page and you go back a page. Very easy from the get go. The text displays at a nice readable font size, with a font that’s easy on the eyes. Flipping the iPhone on it’s side, Ibis Reader knows to change the size of my page. The only thing that doesn’t seem to work here is the cover, which is a graphic, and not a huge concern in my opinion.

Since Ibis Reader takes advantage of local storage space the book reads fast. Page loads take only rendering time, and since it’s text, that’s no time at all.

I am very happy with how simple and easy this application runs. If I didn’t know better I would think it was a native app that ran locally on my iPhone. Bravo @liza, this is work to be very proud of.

Last night I was browsing twitter when one of my tweeps mentioned an article about iPhone and Flash. The article basically stated that before the release of the iPhone there were discussions of using flash on the iPhone for application development. That talks went south and since then there was no turning back. Now whether there is any truth to that I don’t know. What made the article interesting was the mention of an SDK called Corona by a company called Ansca Mobile. Essentially it’s a scripting language similar to actionscript/javascript that allows you to build iPhone apps as if you were building a Flash application.

I’ve wanted to write Cocoa apps for a while, but with work, and life I haven’t been able to get enough time to wrap my head around Cocoa and bindings and all the fun that goes with it. I know Javascript very well. Since I am a web developer so I thought I would give Corona a shot.

Corona cost $99 but there’s a 30 day trial version. I downloaded the trial version, and started reading through the docs (ok skimming through the docs) and sample applications. I found the APIDocs to be poor. No real explanation on how to capture events, which on the iPhone is important. Touch events are everything when it comes to the phone. Also, the company seems to be indecisive about some of the touch event naming, like “drag”. They thought it didn’t make sense, but I easily knew what they were talking about. Though I probably would have called it “swipe”. The sample code however was full of useful snippets, and from that I was able to build a 45 line application. That’s right in 45 lines I had the application I have been wanting to write for 5 months. Now I haven’t been able to test it on an iPhone or within Apple’s iPhone simulator. I have tested it in Corona’s iPhone simulator, in order to test it elsewhere I need to pay the $99, so for all I know it could totally break. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that it will work fine on the iPhone, and could revolutionize iPhone development for those who want to quickly get something out without the time consumption of learning Cocoa Touch, or paying an iPhone developer up to $150/hr

I am looking forward to them having a version that supports the iPad, I am sure they are working diligently on it.