iPad magazine app concept

Question

What is the best way and technique to develop an iPad magazine-like appication? Is it possible to use HTML 5 and CSS, including swipe effects and stuff like that?

What are other techniques?

Answer 1

I tried hundreds of techniques, which sucked up memory, required a million lines of code, and was at least 200MB. Then I had a stroke of genius last night.

1. use storyboards, and gesture to swipe / modal / Cross Dissolve transition to and from each ViewController
2. instead of trying to pull in a PDF or image, throw your text into an HTML file, and use an embedded HTML link
3. have your index as buttons that go to each view
4. BONUS: cool feature to add would be a "tap" gesture on each page, so that after 2 taps the index pops up, that way the user doesn't have to swipe all the way back

CODE FOR PART 2

-(void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
NSString* filePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle]
          pathForResource:@"yourtexthere"
          ofType:@"html"
          inDirectory:@"folderwhereyousavedit"];
NSURL* fileURL = [[NSURL fileURLWithPath:filePath];
NSURLRequest*request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:fileURL];
[webView loadRequest:request];
}

in the .h

@property (weak, nonatomic) IBOutlet UIWebView *webView;

and of course synthesize that in the .m, and connect it to the appropriate viewController...and eventually throw it into Apple's Newsstand.

This technique maintains the integrity of the text, has minimal coding, and keeps a small file-size.

Holler if you need any more help with this.

Answer 2

Yes you can do this using html5 technology, touch techniques and CSS. I have found relying on css3 animations to be where a lot of the memory leaks were coming from for my project. It depends on being selective with what arts have CSS accelerations.

It is not finished, nor is it open source. You can view some test uses here and contact me for more info regarding setup: http://stacks.acadnet.ca/

A new version pulls content out of appropriately tagged tumbl posts, but it is not ready for display. This system also has full screen background images which can be locked to provide two-page spreads.

This isn't an open system because of development time (2years) and it is the core of a masters concept.

Answer 3

Using only HTML5 and CSS would be difficult to have a swipe effect of the same quality as iBooks. You would likely want to develop your own native app that uses OpenGL for the effect.

Check this question for getting started on implementing the page swipe animation.

Answer 4

Another tecnique is to use the magazine pdf document and render it directly.

The implementation process is tedious, but don't need to refactor the magazine.

If you want to use a libray we've designed FastPdfKit to help on these process. Take a look at FastPdfKit.com and grab the free code on github.