Tag Archives: ABC of the Sea

ABC of the Sea released!

About a week ago ABC of the Sea was accepted by Apple for inclusion in the App Store! It’s a universal app that will work on all recent iOS devices but it really is visually more exciting on the iPad.

Obligatory plug: It’s only 99¢ (or other local denomination)! Go buy it!

ABC of the Sea is a children-focused animated book featuring 26 pages of hand-drawn marine life. The illustrations were originally produced by my wife many years ago but never published. Our own child can now read and a print of the book surfaced which she thoroughly enjoyed. We then had the idea to turn it into an iPad application. Each page has been carefully, but subtly animated in a fashion largely consistent with how the creature (or plant) behaves in its natural habitat, though some artistic license has been taken if the real-life movements would be virtually undetectable. Continue reading

The anatomy of a page curl

As I was developing the ABC of the Sea App, which is an interactive picture-book based on a proof-of-concept Tara (my wife) made many years ago and did not publish, one of the early and obvious items on the checklist of cool things it should do is have a nice page curl transition when moving between pages. Initially I expected this to be easy – Apples Apps do this, iBooks on the iPad especially, so it’s built in, right?

Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. I quickly discovered that the only documented curling transition for a UIView goes up/down, not left/right. It’s the one that Maps uses. Some Googling then revealed that an undocumented transition did perform left/right curling. However, being undocumented means it’s not viable for an App Store submission. It may later acquire an official constant and become kosher, but not yet.

Continue reading