This past weekend, Demibooks participated in TechWeek, a conference in Chicago that celebrates technology, web, and interactive communities. We had the opportunity to present and demo Composer, to which we received many positive reactions. (We are very excited about it’s upcoming launch in the App Store later this summer. Stay tuned to this blog for full details…) Here are a few pics of the Demibooks team from TechWeek:

And a pic of our booth featuring Saadat Qadri and Demibooks CTO Andy Skinner:

At TechWeek, Demibooks Founder Rafiq Ahmed participated in a panel discussion on digital publishing. Moderated by O’Reilly Media’s Peter Meyers, Rafiq was joined by Kira Lynn, Publisher at Kane Miller Books; Dominique Raccah, Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, Inc.; and Pek Pongpaet, Founder of ShelfLuv.

A pic of Rafiq showcasing Kane Miller Book’s forthcoming book app, A Garden For Pig during the discussion:

and finally, an action shot of the panel (from l. to r.: Peter Meyers, Kira Lynn, Rafiq Ahmed, and Pek Pongpaet):

Here’s a pictorial recap of TechWeek via twitter.

The following post is authored by guest blogger Anna Grossnickle Hines, children’s author and illustrator. Watch for her forthcoming book app Not Without Bear.

Okay, confession time. I just became eligible for Medicare. I could be looking at retirement, but what fun is that? How about a new career instead?

Last November, my son-in-law, who does computer animation, offered to help me make a trailer for my book, I Am a Tyrannosaurus (published July 12, 2011). My husband, an experienced audio-visual guy, recorded my granddaughter saying the lines, added some music, and WOW! What a treat to see my book come to life on the screen.

Then we thought, why just make trailers? Let’s make apps! Two of my daughters are also writers and the third is an illustrator–married to another computer genius. We formed our own company: appropo.

So my husband and I set out to learn something about programming: Xcode and Objective-C. Aargh! I was enjoying the challenge, but the early projects were calculators with lots of math. When would we get to the fun stuff?

Then I heard about Composer and signed on. It was a little perplexing at first–there wasn’t much in the way of instruction in the beginning as it was in Beta–but in a few days I was making things happen on my iPad–fun things, like a porpoise bouncing around a tub! I could start a real app right away!

I decided on Not Without Bear, a pop-up book published in 2000 and out of print too soon after. It had been fun to see what actions I could create with folded paper. What might I be able to do with it as an app? I started in the vertical format using mostly scanned art that I mushed around a bit in Photoshop. Even with rough art, it was a thrill to see what could happen.

On one of my first pages I was able to make the wheels turn, Bear rise out of the backpack, and the cat go up and down in the basket.

Within a month I had 7 pages with numerous interactions. Much more fun than building calculators in Xcode and–dare I admit it after authoring more than 60 books?–even more fun than writing and illustrating another book.

Early in June I shared my app with my family partners, to an enthusiastic response and some helpful input. I switched to the newly available horizontal format, got serious about the art, and started adding sound effects and music. Now things were really popping!

The action starts right off on the cover with Audrey rocking and giggling to a lively tune, and is followed by 9 story pages–7 of which are nearly completed.

Thanks to my family and to Demibooks, I have a whole new creative avenue to explore, and I’ll be working with the people I love most in the world. What could be better?

A lite version of Not Without Bear should be available soon, and the full version shortly after. Check out appropo’s Facebook page or forthcoming website (www.appropo.co) for more info or visit my page at www.aghines.com

Demibooks Composer will be participating in TechWeek in Chicago this weekend. If you are going to be there, please stop by to say hi. Demos and discussions … should be a good time!

Here’s a rundown of our events:
Saturday, July 23 at 12:30 p.m. CT: Demibooks founder Rafiq Ahmed will be participating in a panel discussion on Digital Publishing. The discussion will address how the publishing industry is embracing new software platforms, including book app technologies like Demibooks Composer.

Monday, July 25: Demibooks will be demoing Composer at midVentures Launch, part of the TechWeek program. We’ve also been selected at one of the top 35 start-ups to participate mVLaunch’s start-up competition COMPETE. This will also take place on Monday. Please come to cheer us on! Stay tuned to our Twitter account for times and further details.

Registration for TechWeek is still open. We hope to see you there! (If you can’t make it, we’ll get some pics up next week.)

We continue a series of posts by customers using the Private Beta version of Composer. Today’s guest post again comes from Branden Hart. His wife Karen Hart is the author and illustrator of the forthcoming children’s picture book, A is vir Aardvark.

Animation

The concept of interactive books has always interested me, and having a daughter that struggles with concentration, the way she adapted to the iPad and increased her levels of concentration made me value the use of pictures and sounds in stories a lot more.

With the absence of a story line at the time, my wife Karen and I decided to compose and illustrate an Afrikaans alphabet using Demibooks Composer.

The first challenge was finding an animal that started with each letter of the alphabet, not that easy when Afrikaans makes very limited use of “C”, “Q,” and “Z”. We also wanted to use animals that could be “re-used” in an English version and that also lent themselves to expressive animations.

The first animation we decided to use was A for Aardvark, which became the title for our story book app later on. Karen drew a cute little animation of an aardvark and decided to have it’s tongue move in and out. We used a scan of brown paper for the background; it looked kind of cute – very much like a board book.

Creating the page in Composer was simple. Save the files as a .PNG, drop them in the Composer app section of iTunes, and then simply add them to the page.

I had never worked with animation before, and as Karen says, I struggle making sure hinges open the right way, but this was intuitive.

We explored the functions available through Composer: “Add Animation”, “Physics,” and “Behaviors”. Animating the aardvark was simple; only then did we realize that there were more frames than the three I had bargained on. The animated aardvark had to stick it’s tongue out, pick up an ant, and suck it back in.

The animation grew by 2 more frames.

The part about using Composer that I really enjoyed was being able to preview the page immediately and correct things on the fly. Trying new triggers for the animation was a breeze.

The page looked great, and we proceeded in the same vein to “B for Buffel” and “C for Cheetah.” (A little poetic license here, it’s actually a Jag Luiperd. However Cheetah is acceptable Afrikaans.)

We then started on a page that opened itself up for animation: “D for Dolphin” — we could animate waves, have the Dolphin diving, and create the sounds of the sea in the background.

The Dolphin had 11 Frames; a little fish jumping in and out had 4 and was on an autostart loop; there were 3 sets of waves with 5 movements each; and I timed the sound of a splash to the exact number of frames in the Dolphin frame set. (I hadn’t yet explored the audio triggers – there was an easier way of doing it )

We pushed “Preview” and were very happy with what we had done. My son, Callum, couldn’t stop touching the dolphin and making it jump. He was rather upset though that the fish didn’t react to his touch. Pause for thought. EVERY page we finished went passed the “Kiddy Test” and was reworked until it made sense to THEM.

We previewed from the start of the book, and we realized that the quality of our artwork, animation, and look had improved. Consequently, we decided to rework letters A to C again… Karen re-drew the entire scene from scratch. It looked a lot better.

With our pages not animated, it was now was the time to be a little more adventurous and add sound …

This week we present the beginning of a series of posts by customers using the Private Beta version of Composer. Today’s guest post comes from Branden Hart from South Africa. His wife Karen Hart is the author and illustrator of the forthcoming children’s picture book, A is vir Aardvark.

Setting The Scene

The first side effect of owning an iPad that I noticed, was that the pitter patter of little feet at home now become a stampede to greet me in the evenings followed by a fight over who got to play with the iPad first.

Didn’t I feel redundant?

The applications available for Free, 99c and even $3.99 were so appealing and engaging for the little ones, that I started thinking of being able to create my own, fantasizing over my little ones squealing with delight as the worked their way through MY application.

Off to Alice! No. Literally I decided to download Alice, learn “Objective-C” and get cracking …. What was I thinking?!

In the 2011 world of “Instant Gratification”, there must be a better way … surely?

That is when I hit the App Store and Google and found Astrojammies by Stacey Williams-Ng, published by Demibooks. The kids loved it, the Space Baboon freaked my wife out a bit. Best of all there was mention of a “BETA test” – I was intrigued.

I was approved as a Beta tester and we were A for Aardvark – You’ll understand later.

The interface was simple enough to grasp, the idea of assigning actions and properties to an object were familiar, the method of animation simple, and the Preview…MIND BLOWING!

The one downfall of the Apple App Store that I saw, was the lack of childrens books in Afrikaans, and being a bilingual family this tugged at the light switch of enlightenment, why not start with an Afrikaans book followed by an English version? Why limit it to two langauges, we have 11 official languages in South Africa after all.

We opted to do an illustrated Alphabet in English and Afrikaans, A is vir Aardvark was born.

Karen started drawing, and I did the Photoshop and iPad work.

I will never forget the expression of pure Joy I saw on Karen’s face when she first saw one of her drawings come to life. She was hooked, so were the kids and I had found a happy place.

We were pleased to be included in Peter Meyers’ review of digital publishing tools last week on the O’Reilly TOC webcast hosted by Joe Wikert. Peter gave a quick overview of Demibooks™ Composer, our authoring tool that lets you create your own interactive book apps right on the iPad. Through this post and others to come, we’ll shed more light on how our authoring tool and publishing process works.

Peter grouped the various tools in five different categories:
• Mainly text, limited images
• Simple picture books
• Picture books + motion
• Rich page layout
• Complete customization

Demibooks Composer was placed in the “Picture books + motion” category. You can argue about these categorizations and other tools that may have been omitted, but it’s a good start to make sense of the platforms coming to market this year.

Let’s begin walking through the authoring side of Composer at a high level using the help of several books in progress in our private Beta. Part of what has made this journey so enjoyable for the Demibooks team has been the great individuals we’ve come to know during the course of the Beta. You’ll get a chance to hear from some of them directly but for now all I can say is we couldn’t have gotten to this point without them.

Composer has three main modes: Library, Workbench and Preview. In Library view, you can view the books you have in progress, as well as any others someone else has shared with you. Books are saved as a single .DCB file, and can be exported and imported via Dropbox, the free to use web storage service. Prior to publishing to Apple, there’s more work to be done on the .DCB files, but that’s handled by our publishing service and we’ll address that in a future post.

The Workbench lays out the book in either portrait or landscape mode. Pages can be added, rearranged and deleted via the page thumbnails at the bottom of the Workbench. To start a new book, you begin adding images that have been created in tools such as Photoshop and copied to Composer using iTunes. You will also be able to add photos, text, basic animations and sounds to your composition.

Each type of object has a rich set of properties that can be edited via the Inspector. You can do basic edits and arrangements with an object such as the foliage in which Anna Hines may have hidden a bear in her upcoming Not Without Bear (sorry for being a spoiler!). Basic movements such as rotations and changing positions are easy to do.

We also provide a rich set of functions with which you can manipulate your images, animations, sounds, etc. These are accessed via the Effects Editor, which also allows you to set up Audio and enter the fun world of physics! More on that later!

The best thing about having a platform right on the iPad is previewing your book application anytime you want to. You see the pages and interact with the book in this “test” mode, just as your readers will when they read your book app. No waiting for the software team to finish coding something before you can see it. In fact, there’s no coding – Composer does it all for you. And you see it when you want to by selecting Preview.

Book Details is the place to go whenever you want to set global settings such as what page turns you want. It’s also where you select final details required for listing your book on the App Store. There are a few more steps to getting your book published, but in the meantime you can share it with anyone else who also has Composer.

We’ll share more details and insight from our Beta users as we go along. We hope to release Composer this summer. Let us know your questions, and sign up for our mailing list so we can keep you informed on release dates.