Zephyrus of the Anemoi

I am really excited about Apple’s announcement from yesterday (I started writing this yesterday when the excitements was significantly higher, but got pulled away and finished tonight). iBooks Author and the new textbooks available through iBooks are an amazing thing for educators, students, and publishers. As an employee of an educational institution, I’m looking forward to seeing how excited students are to use iBooks for education. Even more exciting is the possibility of teachers using iBooks Author to create their own texts to expand upon the content of other textbooks or their own lesson plans.

To really see just what can be done with iBooks Author and how it compares to exporting an ebook from Pages, I took a short story I wrote back in 2005 and made both an iBook in iBooks Author and an ePub in Pages. The iBook only works on an iPad and is fixed in its format, so if you have trouble with small text, you better hope that the iBook you’re reading uses large enough letters for you. The ePub works on both iPhone and iPad (or any other ebook reader that supports ePub) and in many different ebook apps. However, only the iBooks app displays the ePub properly. Bluefire zoomed in on the embedded image, making it look strange and Stanza shifted it to the right for some strange reason.

Anyway, if you’d like to compare the two formats yourself, I’ve made them both available for download here:

Wanderings – iBooks format

Wanderings – ePub format

(The photo in both versions of the book is copyright Wayne Silver, distributed via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)

I recently downloaded Mole Kart on the App Store (I am not linking to the app, as I’m not endorsing this product and don’t want anyone to buy it on accident.

It is a testament to how desperate people are for Mario Kart on the iPhone that anyone has bothered giving this game a 5-star rating. The controls are decent, but the physics are inconsistent and unintuitive.

I could forgive this game if it had been “heavily-inspired” by Mario Kart. But it is a direct rip-off. Every level is a poorly cloned copy of a level straight out of Mario Kart. All of the items are simply new graphics with the same functionality as those of Mario Kart.

Everything about this game screams “rush job”. There are simply too many reasons not to waste your money on this.

I want a solid kart racer on iOS, too, but this isn’t the way to get it. Thankfully, Sonic Racing is actually pretty fun. Not the best, but better than the rest.