The best interactive books for iPad

I have been working lately on a project for an interactive book for the iPad (more on this in the coming months, I hope). Now, the definition of interactive book is still quite fuzzy, so that products that you find labelled as such may not always correspond to your expectations for the word “interactive” (this is an euphemism to avoid saying explicitly that many of them are pretty delusive and quite possibly not worth the money they cost). Anyway, a few of such interactive books are, IMO, really impressive, both for their general quality and for the work that went into defining what “interaction” could mean in something that is not exactly a book, nor a game, nor an animated comics.

Here is a list of interactive books that I know of at the moment, and that I hope I will be able to maintain up to date. I am not focusing on interactive books that, IMO, fail short on the “interaction” part (i.e., just zooming in and out, moving the camera along, touching objects is not enough for me).

  1. Unwanted Guest, from Moving Titles; (and generally speaking all titles from Moving Titles)
  2. Alice for iPad, from Atomic Antelope;
  3. The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, from Moonbot Studios;
  4. The Little Mermaid, from Game Collage; (and other titles from them, also)
  5. Pinocchio, from Elastico.
As I said, I will come back on this topic in the future, and I hope to expand this post to include more info and thoughts.

Fast grid effects for Cocos2D on the iPhone

Cocos2D is a widely used framework for building games for iOS, as it provides a consistent, game oriented, higher-level interface to the OpenGL-ES iOS underpinnings. Cocos2D sports many basic features that are a real life-saver when it comes to squeezing the last FPS from your device or optimizing memory usage, while also offering advanced features that would cost you some effort to implement on your own.

A Interaction Design/Usability List

Some resources on the topic:

Smoothing CCGridActions in Cocos2D for iPhone

CCGridActions are a great feature of cocos2d. They provide nice 2D and “3D” effects that you can use to make your app or game appearance more appealing. I have already written about them, mostly about the high cost the exact in terms of CPU time (and FPS), what makes them barely usable in a real, sufficiently complex scenario. In a recent post of mine, I described a solution to this issue, which though not a full replacement for “real” grid actions, makes them usable, fast, and not at all demanding in terms of processing power.

ASIHTTP is "dead", long live to it!

I used ASIHTTP in a couple of projects of mine, and always found it was very useful. Unfortunately, its creator and maintainer decided to end its involvement with the project, due to a bunch of reasons that you can read about in his own post. It’s sad anyway reading about “vitriol” being poured upon anyone who simply gave away his code for free to whom could need it.