Using Hype for interactive iBook content

Hi all,

I’m working on an ebook for kids and others who are new to competitive archery. I’m planning to publish it in the iBook Store initially and would like to build some interactive tutorials including one on how to score arrows. See below for a quick mockup of how that might look.

Clicking the “New End” button would randomly place the three gray circles on the target face so the reader could calculate and check a new score.

Is Hype a good candidate for building this type of interaction into an iBook?

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I’m biased, but I’d say Hype is probably good for quickly setting up the layout and visuals. You’d still need JavaScript to randomly place the arrows and verify the score. You’d need a little bit of HTML for an input box, but all the buttons and everything else can be made in Hype. There’s a free trial available, so feel free to take it for a spin!

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I published two interactive books with iBooks and Hype…

It’s not perfect, but it worked for my needs. I wrote about the experience here… https://photics.com/apples-ibooks-store-worth-the-effort/
…here… https://photics.com/ibooks-author-try-again/
…and here… https://photics.com/pages-vs-ibooks-author-which-is-better-for-ebooks/

I think the biggest issue is that ePub readers aren’t catching on to Apple’s widget specs… http://www.idpf.org/epub/sc/pkg/packaging-20140528.html …at least, I’m not aware of any software that works with Hype’s HTML Widget besides the iBooks Author / iBooks combo. (I prefer the “ePub” template over the “iBooks” format.)

It’s worked so well that I’m a best selling author. The Hype book reached #1 in the “Computers & Internet” section of iTunes. That was pretty neat. I’m considering publishing another interactive book, which will likely use the Hype / iBooks Author combo – it might involve Kickstarter too.

I think the biggest issue is how fullscreen / on page is treated. It’s a little cumbersome. Also, it’s tough to build widgets that size properly. With screens as big as an iPad Pro, down to an iPhone 4S, there’s a lot of variance. Many of the widgets I created use custom JavaScript. It’s very challenging.

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Thanks for the post, Michael. I had already purchased your book this afternoon and starting working through it tonight. I’m going to give it a go.

I liked the sound of this so I ran up this version to see if I could get it to work.

As @jonathan says, Hype is well suited for this. But you need to add some JS and manually set the inputs.

I threw this together while I had 10mins here and there so it probably could be written simpler!.

One thing I may look at is stop shots that do not hit the target which I thing should be easy now I have the main code down. But you may want some to miss??.

targetArea.hype.zip (40.1 KB)

I have left the score numbers I was using on the target but you can simply take those off


Update, In this one the shots do not miss the target…

targetArea v2.hype.zip (40.3 KB)

Again quickly done so probably could be tided up :slight_smile:

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Mark, this was incredibly generous of you. Thanks for the help getting a leg up on this challenge. I’ll use your suggestions as a foundation and work on more of these.

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