TOC: Designing and Creating a Social Book App using Open-source Technologies - Haig Armen

Strategy – PhoneGap

Design – jQueryMobil

Glue - JSON API bridge

Recomended reading: A Social Book and 50 Years of Life Online by Alexandra Samuel

Can reading a book be a participatory and a social experience?

The social component should be integrated in such a way that it does not get in the way of the original content of the book.

How can the book be dynamic?

Problems with social books:

1. Social usually means sharing quotes outside the book – Facebook Twitter
2. Reader's comments are private and hidden from other readers
3. Comments are separated from the text into another space

Stack: Native application <= phonegap => HTML CSS JS <= JSON API => Wordpress CMS

PhoneGap was bought by Adobe so it’ll be part of DreamWeaver. Cordova became the open source version of PhoneGap.

Gestures are the way to navigate a book, because the closer the user gets to the content the more they engage with it.

In 50 years book the table of contents is a decade view with each decade color coded. It allows you to go into a year list of each decade and each year is an article.

Pinch drills into content, reverse pinch goes back.

There are little indicators with numbers to tell you how many comments are available. They open to reveal all comments. Comments can be rated to be promoted to be part of the text.

PhoneGap Build is a webservice that creates an app for you with the HTML that you send to it.

To use PhoneGap in XCode turn off “automatic reference counting”

JQueryMobile.com

HTML meta tag “viewport” needs to be added to keep the browser from scalling

Embed the jQuery CSS and scripts

The

will use a “data-role” argument to tell jQuery about the div container.

A little bounce animation on interactive elements makes a huge difference in intuitive design.

Clear  (a to do list app) has a good interface for teaching you how to use it

All of the code for this social book project will be on github when its complete. Watch @haigharmen on Twitter for updates

Each paragraph in the book was a Wordpress post. This facilitated comments because they’re regular Wordpress comments.

Revenue stream should be based on the content and not the app

Chose native app over open web because it makes it so much easier to offer offline support.

They need a name for this open source social book project – tweet the name to hashtag #socialbook

^.^

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