Category : mountaintop musings

So, based on discussions with a number of local comics people, especially in the wake of the recent ComiXology Amazon buyout, and the brouhaha over the removal of purchase options from ComiXology’s app, I decided to put together a primer on how to build EPUB comic books, like the ones I’m doing, for folks who are interested in getting onto the iBooks platform.

Now, I’ve never used ComiXology, so my opinions / comparisons are somewhat secondhand, but here’s the way iBooks works.

• You, the creator do all the work authoring the files – Apple doesn’t alter, fix, edit or optimise them.
• You, the creator set the price – Apple doesn’t discount, give away or in any other way mess with your retail price.
• You, the creator get 70% of the cover price.
• You, the creator can build the preview version of your book, and the iBooks reader app will automatically display a “buy & download the full version” link on a blank last page added.
• You, the creator upload your own choice of example screenshots.
• iBooks / iTunes store tech support staff are brilliant – super helpful, super keen, and keep you in the loop if there’s a problem that needs to be fixed at Apple’s end.
• As far as I know, you can pull your book at any time, and it will go off sale (no contracts granting Apple x-number of years of sales), though those who’ve bought it already will continue to be able to download it.
• You get to choose if your book has DRM or not. Personally, I do put DRM on my files, because it ensures the reading experience is the one I created (given I use a lot of WebKit specific design and scripting) – locking the reader to iBooks on a Mac or iPad. Non-DRMed files are still watermarked to the buyer’s iTunes store account.

With comics, you’re producing what’s called a “fixed layout EPUB”, which in the iBooks reader app means your page art is edge to edge, and the controls are displayed differently. The authoring tools necessary are a text editor, and any image editing apps you already use.

A Fixed Layout EPUB is basically a website. Each page of your book is a separate webpage, with content entered using HTML, and CSS to define how everything looks. You define the size of the viewport to be the size of your page, and then you can use positioning values to place things exactly where you want them.

It’s web design, without the ambiguities of working with multiple browser engines / window sizes etc. Better yet, becuase it’s a walled garden of WebKit, you can use lots of WebKit specific CSS that hasn’t been ratified as part of CSS3 yet.

The Merchant Process

In order to sell books on iBooks you have to do the following:

• Obtain a US Tax ID.
  • One option is to get an ITIN – this is long and expensive, requiring sending a passport to the US consulate for ID verification, plus document fees.
  • The second option is quick and cheap – call the IRS in America and get an EIN, as documented here. This takes about 2 weeks for everything to work its way through so that your EIN is recognised by Apple’s systems.
  • NOTE: income earned via the iTunes / iBooks store is taxed in America at (from memory) a 30% rate, which you can then claim back from the Australian Tax Office as a credit under international treaties against double-taxation.
• Sign up for an iTunes Merchant account to sell on the iBooks store.
  • Free accounts can offer only free books, but don’t require you giving Apple banking & US Tax information.
  • Paid accounts require you to give Apple your bank details (so they can pay you your residuals), and the aforementioned US Tax information, buy you don’t have to pay for the account itself
• (Depreciated – this program has now closed, and book authoring doesn’t require a dev account) Sign Up for an Apple Developer account so you can download tools and access the developer support forums. The type of account you need is the Safari Developer Program – it’s free, and gives you write access to all the forums which are to do with iBooks, and WebKit. You can read all the other forums. Needless to say, these are all NDA covered.
• Upload your file, excerpt, screenshots and metadata (pricing, territories etc) using iTunes Producer. iTP will preflight your files, identify any problems, like code bugs, and tell you what they are so you can fix them.
• Initial approval usually takes about 10 working days, and updates take around the same amount of time.

The Authoring Process

My first recommendation is to read the lessons on R. Scott John’s blog, starting with:

• How to Create Fixed-Layout iBooks, Part 1

…and ending with part 7.

Then read:

• iBooks Tutorial 3.0 Update
• iBooks Image Limit Increased To 3.2 Million Pixels

That should give you all the information you need to get the basic thing up and running. Some additional tips:

• iBooks on the Mac allows you to direct load your EPUB working files to the iPad for preview and debug.
• iBooks Author doesn’t currently do paginated books, with zoomable art.

Any questions, hit me up in the comments. Oh and one final thing – if this is of use, go buy a copy of The Metaning on iTunes. Researching & collecting all this information together took most of my time over a couple of weeks, and there’s a lot of garbage information out there, or information that’s only available via paid sources – the “buy my ebook on how to make ebooks” type thing. Getting a few book sales would be a nice payback.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

Images from my tour of Gibbs Farm in New Zealand.

Opening disclaimer: I have previously purchased a Jot Touch 4, and an original Jot Touch. The first generation model has unfortunately been made obsolete by changes in iOS 7, and so I was provided with a “keeper” review unit by Adonit, and Mobile Zap Australia, as a replacement.

As an artist, and one of them “Readers”, my kit for whenever I was out of the house day to day usually contained the following:

• A4 Sketchbook.
• Blue lead mechanical pencil.
• Graphite mechanical pencil.
• Eraser.
• Paperbook novel.

When the iPad came into my life, I had the chance to consolidate, and the linchpin for all of this, and indeed the one missing part of the iPad puzzle that allowed me to adopt the platform, was the Jot Touch 4.

The Jot Touch is an iPad stylus which, uniquely when it debuted, provides pressure-sensitivity much like that of a Wacom tablet. It’s a genius solution to the problem of iPads not actually being pressure sensitive – the iPad natively tracks the location of the touch from the stylus tip, and the pressure information is measured in the pen, then communicated in realtime over Bluetooth.

To get the benefit of this, one needs a Jot enabled app, and my weapon of choice at the moment is ProCreate. If you click on the image above, what you’re seeing is a single tool – the 6b pencil, with no adjustments made during the entire drawing session. Everything there comes from the range of pressure available in the pen. It’s been a while since I did any repetitive drawing exercises , but the range of thin and thick strokes, variations from thin to thick and back, and ability of the pen to reliably keep up with my fast scribble drawing style mean that this tool is in every way a capable replacement for analog drawing implements.

Now, obviously a question that’s going to arise is what it’s like compared to an actual Wacom tablet. Adonit list the pen as recognising 2048 levels of pressure, much the same as the current desktop Wacom technology, and possibly more than many of the “Wacom enabled” tablet devices out there. For me, however it comes down to this – how good is your muscular control, that you could be that subtle in pressing on a pen? You can see some jitteryness and straight bits in loops in the image above – that’s entirely down to me and my less than rock-steady hands.

In terms of the hardware itself, The construction quality is utterly sublime. The stylus has a cylindrical aluminium barrel in charcoal or a deep lustrous red, and a rubber coated grip area with two buttons that can be mapped to control various functions. Between the buttons is a status LED, which glows red while charging, and green to indicate switch on, or charged. The cap screws off, and can be screwed onto the base when in use. Under the cap is the nib itself – a biro-fine metal tip ending in a clear plastic disc attached in the middle with a ball & socket joint.

This combination takes a moment of acclimation, and a bit of care when the lid is off. Once you start using it however, the ingenuity of the solution becomes apparent. The iPad has a minimum touch target size – around 5mm in diameter, and this has resulted in most styli being fat crayons, whose tip thickness obscures the point at which marks are made. The Jot’s clear disc, and fine metal tip mean that you can clearly see where your pen mark is happening, at least as clearly as you would with any analog drawing implement. In ProCreate, I have the brush outline switched on, and it’s clearly visible through the disc. So, you get direct visual feedback of how the pressure you’re applying translates into brush size – assuming that’s the dynamic you’ve got enabled.

This brings up an important point – because the iPad has a hard, flat, glass screen, and the Jot Touch has a hard, flat, plastic tip, a small bit of grit could potentially get caught between them. If you’re pushing down on the pen, there’s a risk of scratching your iPad’s glass. My recommendation is to carry a micro-fibre cloth, and then clean both the iPad, and the pen tip before each drawing session. Another option might be to try a screen protector if the cleaning solution is unworkable.

Back to the stylus’ construction, possibly one of the nicest features is the recharging setup. The end of the pen latches into a usb recharging dock which is about the size of a tiny USB thumb drive. It’s held in by magnets, strong magnets, which support the pen securely regardless of orientation – mine hangs in space parallel to the floor, the charger plugged into the usb port in the side of one of my displays.  The magnets also make docking the stylus automatic – get the end of the stylus close enough, and it will auto-align and pull into place.

The battery lasts long enough that I’ve never even come close to wearing it out – Adonit claims a month of “nomal use”. Like most of my devices, I plug it in each night, but you can happily leave the Jot in a bag for days without worrying about lacking power. I’m a big fan of built in batteries – the idea of having to use something like AAA batteries for a device is one of my pet peeves, so the Jot’s power setup really is a brilliant solution.

I’d like to close with a comparison – last week I received a Wacom Airbrush stylus, which I was intending to use to replace my broken Intuos4 XL Grip pen. It costs basically the same as the Jot Touch, and while it has a different featureset, in terms of build quality I think it’s reasonable to compare them. The Wacom pen is back with the distributor for exchange because all of the internals were so poorly fitted to the case that pressing the eraser in made the tip move out. It also felt fragile, hollow, squeezable under grip pressure, and cheap. The Jot Touch is utterly unlike that which we put up with from Wacom. It’s a true masterpiece of solid, functional, spare, Modernist industrial design, and a standard to which all objects one holds in one’s hand, should aspire.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

Occasionally, I like to engage in a bit of recreational tech prognostication, and with the current hubbub over what Apple will do next, it seems there’s a considerable slice of the world who thinks the next big thing is a “smart” watch.

This is dumb.

Brutally dumb.

Apple, in its current aesthetic is a premium product company. If they are going to make a product, it will feel like the most materially luxurious version of that product. Hence the metal and glass design language they’ve adopted over the past few years.

Here’s the thing, most people don’t wear watches any more. They’ve become an enthusiast device, and the premium end of the market is mechanical. Mechanical to the point of fetishising that very nature, so that whole new classes of designs and movements are being invented, creating even more baroque ways to enable accurate progression via purely mechanical means. The joy of the modern watch is to wear a mechanical engine on your wrist.

That leaves the other wrist. Whatever Apple is working on, will be something you’d keep on your wrist while NOT wearing a watch. It will not be a portal to your phone, it will probably not have a screen at all. My bet, it’s going to be a motion recorder, like fitbit, which allows you to log and stream all your movement for interactivity like a wiimote.

More importantly, it also acts as a wearable passcode key for all your devices. Your mac unlocks when you approach, and locks again when you leave, your phone and tablet unlock when you pick them up, and it talks to iBeacon-using smart house devices (ie those who will fill the void left by NEST becoming a pariah for joining Google) around your house for smart house integration. iBeacon will be the new feature for home environment and control devices, the way AirPrint became a must-have for printers. It’ll be waterproof, and charge inductively.

There is no “how do I tell the time on my wrist” problem to be solved. There is no “how do I get a small music player for while I’m exercising” problem to be solved. There is no “I want to see my email but not take my phone out of my pocket” problem to solve, no actual people think like that. All the “problems” current smart watches “solve” were invented post-hoc purely to justify the concept of the “smart watch”.

Whatever it is, it won’t solve a glaring problem you, or anyone else thinks you have. It will solve problems that were so constant, so low level so much a part of the background friction of your life, that you never recognised them for what they were.

Update March 10th:

Here’s an article on an Apple patent for for doing one of the things I mentioned.

Opening disclaimer: I was supplied with the test unit by MobileZap Australia, and allowed to keep it.

The Kit: Bluetooth Keyboard Case is a leather folio style tablet case designed to fit full sized tablets in the 9-10 inch range. It does so by having plastic clips which grip around the corners of the tablet, are connected to the case with elastic, and can therefore stretch outwards, accommodating larger form factors. In this case, I’m testing with an iPad Air, which unfortunately is too thin on its own for the clips to grip securely. You might want to look for a specific iPad Air case if you want to use that particular tablet. Alternatively, if you have one of Apple’s smart cases around your Air, I’m using the black leather one myself, it will bulk it out sufficiently for the clips to maintain a firm grip on the device, and the cover flap can close over your screen before you fold the keyboard against it.

The construction seems very sturdy, being stitched leather, with a soft suede-feel inside. The back of the case has a magnetically secured kickstand to prop the screen up while open, and the whole thing is kept closed by a leather flap and loop arrangement, which seems secure enough.

The keyboard itself is removable from the case, and held in with magnets, which makes it convenient to keep the single sheet instructions underneath. It can be removed and used without the folio, as the battery is within keyboard itself. It’s a reasonable keyboard, featuring about 5mm of travel and a full row of function keys. My only real criticism of it, coming from a Mac background, is that the right shift key is too small for the way I type (right pinkie finger used to activate shift). Given a perfect world, I would have preferred a smaller single line enter key, and a relocation & resizing of the End & right Control keys, respectively. That said, the keyboard is very usable, and I was able to comfortably code up a website while on the road. This is probably the biggest blessing of an external keyboard for someone like me, who actually really likes typing on the screen – the on-screen keyboard eats half the display, which is problematic when doing extended writing / coding sessions. I’m writing this review on the keyboard, and having the full screen to read back and ahead is so much better for keeping the context of the bit you’re writing at that moment in your head.

In terms of battery life, I haven’t been able to determine how long it lasts – though my habit with electronic devices is to charge them every night, I’ve been using this keyboard sporadically since December 18, and it’s still working on its initial charge. The manual lists 80 days standby, and 90 hours use. Charging is an area where I have a criticism of this product, however. Although the single sheet user manual states the product comes with a charger cable, my particular example didn’t include one. Thankfully I was able to find a charger for a bluetooth headset that happened to have the required micro-usb connector. Pairing and activating the keyboard is easy, with a built in key combo to wake the connection up after it’s been switched off.

All in all this is an effective and reasonably priced solution, which has a distinct advantage of not being tied to any particular model of tablet. If you’re in a situation where you want to provide standardised keyboard covers for multiple types of tablet, or have multiple tablets, but only want a single keyboard cover, this may be something to have a look at.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

So there’s this bug in the calendar app in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, where even though the reminders preferences are set to “None”, when you create new events they’ll show a reminder for the day before at 9am.

Having gone quietly mad trying to figure out the problem (there seem to be several solutions listed online relating to editing .plist files, none of which work), the situation and solution is thus:

When Calendar.app is started up afresh, there are 3(4) calendars in it:

• Home
• Work
• Birthdays
• (Reminders)

These have no reminders set in them, however any new calendars created will have the 9am day before default for any events created even if the preferences are set to none.

The solution is to create any new calendars, then create a new event, and open the inspector to you can see the event’s properties. Open the preferences, and toggle the reminders from none, to one of the other options and close preferences. Then open it again, toggle the reminders setting back to none, and close preferences again.

Problem solved.

If this article was of use, a donation would help support my projects.

The past month has seen some interesting developments on the “professional” artist path I began walking a few years ago when I started my Fine Art degree. So, it seemed like a good time to take stock, and write a few things about them.

I started my degree in 2007, initially thinking I’d study painting to improve my comic art skills. One of my goals was to come close to the sort of work Jon J Muth & Kent Williams achieved with books like Moonshadow and Meltdown. Around that time, the fact I’d released the first two parts of Surfing The Deathline lead to me doing a bunch of rough pencils and page & layout designs for a company pitching comics as a reading aid. That lead to me delivering studio session workshops to school groups at the Art Gallery of NSW, as a part of the Osamu Tezuka exhibition. Something had to give, and so I switched my degree to part-time. In 2008 I got my first chance to get into the studios for specialist disciplines, with rotations through painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and photography.

To my surprise, I absolutely fell in love with ceramics, sculpture and photography, and loathed painting. In photography, I was able to dive deep into serious art-making almost straight away, and over that first 4 weeks, created the Cages series of images. In the second 5 week rotation, the Flight / Fight images were produced, and I started thinking sculpturally in terms of photographing things I’d constructed. While I enjoyed ceramics a great deal, it turned out that it was sculpture which truly captured my heart.

Three years later, I completed my sculpture major, and had my end of year show. A few months after that, I had my first piece in a large outdoor exhibition, and now a year later, and 6.5 years after starting my degree, I’ve had my graduation. Oh yeah, more importantly, I’ve had a yet-to-be-made work accepted for the 2014 Sculpture By The Sea exhibition at Bondi.

That leaves a year and a half to fill, so what am I going to do with the time? Well, in the same week of my graduation, I received word that I’d been awarded my first grant by the Australia Council – Australia’s main public arts funding body.

The grant itself is called ArtStart, and is for a pretty tidy sum – $10k. Now, it’s not free money to do with as I please, rather, it’s specifically for business development and training. Every cent had to be budgeted and money couldn’t be used for living expenses, making or exhibiting work, or paying oneself a salary. So, the final outcome is that I’m going to buy a rather fancy camera setup, and do a bunch of training in what amounts to product photography, as well as some accredited SketchUp 3D / Architectural design classes.

So, over the course of less than a month I got into one of the most important sculpture exhibitions in Australia, received my Bachelor’s degree, and got a nice big arts grant. Right at the moment, I seem to be making this thing work.

This is a living list of the glitches and bugs, and general “this is not a fit and proper product for sale” nonsense I’ve had while playing the Far Cry 3 multiplayer mode on Xbox Live.

• Can’t find servers – 5-10 minute waits to get into a team deathmatch game at times.
• Lag.
• Killed and shown hits in a place I had been seconds earlier, where there hadn’t been any gunfire.
• the bug where another player is raining from the sky as they run along.
• button unresponsiveness – crouch button not working until I’ve jumped
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, requiring a jump to be able to move.
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, and jumping doesn’t work, leaving suicide as the only option.
• stuck in aim mode after using and releasing a mounted weapon.
• “committed suicide” while randomly walking or running along a flat piece of ground with no weapons fire.
• killed in one place, then magically teleported to the other side of the map to bleed out.
• reloading a half full weapon empties it of all but 1 round.
• killed and told I couldn’t be revived because I had been revived already, despite this having not happened.
• had my view wrenched in un-commanded directions while shooting at enemies.
• reloaded a weapon, then immediately revived someone, then find the reload has unhappened after the revive animation is complete.
• get killed and then fall through the map, plummeting through empty space as the terrain disappears into the distance above me.
• get killed, have my body catch fire, respawn on fire and lose all my health.
• get killed, respawn and immediately die again in a secluded area with no enemy present.
• unbalanced numbers on teams. One occasion playing on a team of 2 against 10.
• reload a weapon, attempt to shoot with a full magazine, reload sequence is triggered again, get killed by the person I was attempting to shoot.
• kicked from server due to being idle, while running around on the map looking for someone to kill.
• Spawn into the beginning of the game, with no weapons.
• everyone else frozen while I can still run around, and kill all the opposing players, and keep killing them when they’re on the ground.
• Falling off the ship and getting stuck a foot deep into the deck below.

With 2013 upon us, we’re in the window in which Apple CEO Tim Cook had promised that there’d be something new for Pro customers. Many people interpret this as code for a new Mac Pro which would in some way resemble the current behemoth.

I’m not so sure. I wonder if we’re in for an FCPX-style paradigm shift. Back when Apple introduced the first G3 PowerMac, there were two models of machine serving the Pro desktop market – the Powermac 8600, and 9600. The only difference was that one had three PCI slots, the other had six. The replacement G3 had 3 slots. Apple’s answer to those complaining, was to suggest that many of the previous two-card solutions had consolidated onto single cards, alleviating much of the need for six slots. Further, they suggested that the small fraction of the user base who needed more slots could go buy a PCI expansion chassis, which would plug into an existing slot and provide up to six more.

I hope we’re in for a similar shift on the Mac Pro.

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