iBooks for presentations

[RobM]

I don't know how many of you are experimenting with iBooks for offline iPad presentation but I've been putting in some R&D time.

So far.. Addresses the main issue of Goodreader. Escaping back to a menu.

There are of course some restrictions in iBooks, after all, it is free and a pretty lightweight solution. I thought I could make a page of thumbnails that linked to locally stored panos. I can with the .wdgt setup but that does bring in some issues that I think I RAM related. If I put more than a couple of panos on one page they don't load reliably or won't load at all. It's hit and miss, sometimes they do, others they don't. So I've spread the panos out to one per page. This isn't so bad in my case as they are all of different products.
Another restriction is the way linking or bookmarking is within ibooks. You can't simply link a thumbnail image directly to another page.
I'm getting there though, it seems a reasonable solution to carrying a panorama portfolio around with me and presenting a wide range of media.

I'm curious to hear other people's findings too.

Cheers, Rob

[RobM]

Judging by the lack of feedback people are either loathed to share experiences or aren't using ibooks at all for panos.

I've put in a fair amount of time now and I think I'm banging into the limits already.
I'm building a media presentation for a client. It has 3 videos in there and 2 panos. One pano has no interactive elements inside it, just a basic 8 node map tour.
The other has popup images and video content, built into the tour. The popup images work fine, the videos are failing to load.

Its strange because if I start a new ibook project and use the same .wdgt file, the content works fully.

[Hopki]

Hi Rob,
If you need to update and replace a broken widget, I have found you have to completely remove the widget before you add another. May be even save and close, then restart before adding the new one, Its like it caches it so you could have a working project but just seeing cache and thinking you have a problem.

I put together a pano with six popup videos which was giving me a bit of grief until I realised what was going on.

To test a widget I now always open a new project template, test the widget, then when all working as should put it in my iBook.
Regards,
Hopki

[RobM]

Hi Rob,
If you need to update and replace a broken widget, I have found you have to completely remove the widget before you add another. May be even save and close, then restart before adding the new one, Its like it caches it so you could have a working project but just seeing cache and thinking you have a problem.

I put together a pano with six popup videos which was giving me a bit of grief until I realised what was going on.

To test a widget I now always open a new project template, test the widget, then when all working as should put it in my iBook.
Regards,
Hopki

Hi Martin,

I tested the widget by creating a new ibooks project, threw it in there and it worked. Same widget.
Put it back into my rather loaded up project and the video pops fail. Image popups work fine.

[Hopki]

try just opening a clean template and adding all your widgets, does it work?
Hopki

[RobM]

try just opening a clean template and adding all your widgets, does it work?
Hopki

Yup, that's what I did. They all worked then. Closed and restarted Ibook Author, reopened my main project, and added the widget. Video popups failed.
I even went right back and remade the widget with a different name and had the same problem,
The ibook does have 5 video files, 3 image slide shows and 2 pano tours with popups so I'm really wondering if it's just getting too big.

In another project I also noticed that putting a few HTML widgets on the same page caused problems too, Panos sometimes stop loading completely. Moving the panos to their own page solved that problem.