I am reading Apple iBooks How-to, a short e-book from Packt Publishing, introducing the apps and tools for reading and publishing books via Apple's iBooks and iBooks Author programmes.
Apple iBooks How-to is a hand-holding guide to how to start using iBooks. The books is so easy to follow, provided you have an iPad or another iOS device at hand, that I can already recommend it to whoever has doubts or fears about venturing into self-publishing. Of course, it needn't be something grand, like War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice. You can publish you student paper or a family album too.
This is the new design for the background of my Twitter page at iworkinpages.
It has my book on it and the photo of the famous apple which I've use in the graphic panel of the title of this blog and its favicon (small icon next to the internet address.)
The apple variety is called Winter Banana. My book, with a free sample chapter, is available on Packt Publishing here and on all major book-selling websites.
An active Amazon reviewer W Boudville has published an article about my new book on iWork. It captures, I think, exactly what I was trying to achieve with it.
The gist of what the author is trying to convey
is to free your mindset when using iWork. Do not be conceptually
confined to just having iWork be for one purpose. See if what it outputs
or can accept as input can also be associated with other supposedly
unrelated packages on a machine, like the Microsoft Office suite, or its
arch competitor, Open Office.
At a more mundane level, iWork can
import and export to those packages, so as to transparently enable
these data interchanges. So why doesn't the book just say so? Because
Anichkin is making a deeper point. In your mind, ask what possible
benefits could arise from this cross overs. Keep doing this, rather than
putting iWork or those packages into standalone concrete silos.
Chapter
6 addresses a long running complaint about iWork - that it lacks a Clip
Art folder. Apparently, this just keeps recurring in blogs and forums
related to iWork. Instead, the author suggests that the complaints are
misplaced. There are numerous other applications from which you can
readily import images. And he goes on to show at some length how to do
this. Again, as earlier, this is simple. Once you know that it is
possible, that is the main thing. The precise steps involved are a
lesser detail.
Going further, chapter 8 is for the person needing
professional quality output printing of graphics. It shows how iWork
can be used at this level, for creating press ready PDFs. The process
steps here are not confined to operations inside iWork. You are advised
about manual real world steps that you need to coordinate with your
local print shop to achieve the best quality hardcopy.
You can see the full Contents with previews and summaries of the chapters and read one complete chapter on graphic design. The chapter is about designing logos in iWork/Pages.
My publishers have just told me that the book I have been working on for the past year, iWork for Mac OSX Cookbook, is out in printed version.
Please visit the PACKT Publishing website for details and to order the book. Amazon sites (see which region is closest to you) list the book for pre-orders.
Thank you for the support, without the constant encouragement and support of the readers of I Work in Pages I wouldn't have written the book.
It is hard to be a Mac user and not to be a fan of Steve Jobs (and Steve Wozniak), creators of the first personal computer. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
While this new book may not disclose what it the promises in the title, it does supply a Mac fan with delicious snippets and a few glorious put-downs for Microsoft.
Did you know, for example, that the traffic light buttons at the top left corner of every Mac window were Jobs' idea?
Jobs was asked why MS was inferior to Apple. 'They have no taste' he said.
In the 80s Jobs was trying to recruite a reluctant chief executive of Pepsico to help him run Apple. 'Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?' he asked. The Pepsi man switched to Apple.
In the Jobs-Wozniak duo design and marketing side belongs to Jobs and the technical side to Wozniak.
