The finest apps made with AppOpus

Apptua from Spain has produced some of the finest ebook apps ever made, using AppOpus. They have pushed the application to the limit and beyond. Masterpieces of art and technology.

Astronomía y Método Científico

This is a beginner textbook on astronomy. It is first and foremost a book, never betraying the familiarity of text.

The highlights are the sketch-like sun animation, and a 3-D rotating globe with an observer figure on it in various observation points.

The dead-tree analogy might be popups, but with those, the entire physical structure of the book is cutout and the text is not “normal”. Here the text is perfectly normal, but what would be static illustrations are interactive, almost magically. The critical point is that the interactivity is not “overdone”. What would be illustrations, are interactive animations, but still embedded conservatively a standard print textbook layout. They are not overbearing, but totally complimentary, and that is the real achievement.

This type of thing really could only be implemented in virtual text, and currently only HTML5 at that.

¿Qué ha caído del cielo?

(What has fallen from heaven?)

Like a carved wooden toy, this app represents handmade craftsmanship with character, the gorgeous illustrations and charming animations in particular. The sprites move as if an actual human hand is behind them. They are the moving analogy of hand-drawn artwork.

All this without interfering with the normal text experience. The interactive parts are embedded in a printed book, rather than text appearing in a whole-screen animation, and this distinction cannot be overstated: It feels like a traditional book with magical illustrations, instead of a cartoon with text.

There is no question something like this is the future of children’s books.

–

The original demo apps for AppOpus were pure text, ripped straight from pdf. These are much closer to the original vision. Hopefully they can get the popularity deserving of their work, they could change the face of education.

What do AppOpus admob ads look like?

AppOpus uses admob smart banner ads, displayed non-intrusively but highly visible at the bottom of the page. They rotate several times a minute, so there are several impressions per minute.

This is the ads over the course of a minute:

Generated by AppOpus Commercial Edition with Ads enabled.

Playing sound files in AppOpus

This functionality is API-only and meant for advanced users with Javascript understanding.

We currently do not have a GUI-based “player”, although anyone with enough time should be able to implement one.

The AOSound object is automatically loaded into your page, so all you have to do is call these functions (from your HTML page):

AOSound.load("your_sub_folder/your_file_name.mp3"); // should be called on window.onload
AOSound.play(); // plays the loaded file
AOSound.pause(); // pause, ready to resume on AOSound.play()
AOSound.stop(); // stop, permanantly
AOSound.dur(); // length in milliseconds
AOSound.pos(); // current position in milliseconds
AOSound.playing(); // is AOSound playing a file?
AOSound.seek(your_time_in_milliseconds); // seeks through the loaded file to the specified time

Here is a demo:

<script>

window.onload = function(){AOSound.load(‘audio/sound1.mp3’);};
</script>
<button onclick=“AOSound.play()”>Play</button>
<button onclick=“AOSound.pause()”>Pause</button>
<button onclick=“AOSound.stop()”>Stop</button>
<button onclick=“AOSound.load(‘audio/sound1.mp3’)”>Load Sound 1 (test only)</button>
<button onclick=“AOSound.load(‘audio/sound2.mp3’)”>Load Sound 2 (test only)</button>

How to embed images in AppOpus

This is an example of an image embedded in an AppOpus project:

<img src="./01_files/fig01-01.gif" alt="Figure 1-1. Guidelines for Survival"
        height="312"
        width="350">

In the Working Directory, there is a folder named 01_files that contains a gif file named fig01-01.gif.

This image tag is in the html chapter in the Working Directory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Writeup from DisasterMap.net

Nice writeup from DisasterMap.net on AppOpus (the Survival Guide demo app) 

How to Turn Your Old Smart Phone into a Potentially Life Saving Device ~Ezra Boyd, PhD

 

 

Latest news coverage for AppOpus

Denver Post / Philadelphia Inquirer

Apptitude: Surviving in the urban (and suburban) desert

Plugged in: Could a smartphone application save you in a heat wave?

Paseban

Download Aplikasi Gratis Untuk Ponsel Android Anda

Update: Signing your app just got easier.

We’ve made a massive improvement to the Android apk signing process, so you no longer have to “link” jarsigner to your os path (which is a giant pain for newbies).

You still need the JDK, but once installed, you can start immediately churning out Android apps.

How to change the default font directory in AppOpus Builder

When you start AppOpus Builder, it looks for the default font folder of your Operating System.

• On Windows, it is C:\\WINDOWS\\Fonts
• On Mac, /Library/Fonts//
• On Linux (sometimes) /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype

If your fonts are stored somewhere else, you can point AppOpus Builder to that location, by running from the command line with the following argument:

-fontdir /Path/To/Your/Font/Folder/

And the full terminal command would be:

java -jar /path/to/your/app.jar -fontdir /Path/To/Your/Font/Folder/

How to check if your Android APK file is signed correctly.

This is for all Android APK files, not just those generated by AppOpus Builder.

1. Rename the file to zip
2. Unzip
3. Check to see if their is a folder called “META-INF”

If so, your app is correctly signed.

To sign your apk or jar manually, enter in the command line:

jarsigner -digestalg SHA1 -sigalg MD5withRSA -keystore /Your/path/to/your_keystore.keystore -storepass YourStorepass -keypass YourKeypass /Path/to/Your/apk_file_name.apk YourAlias

 

How-to guide: Text-to-speech without text

Suppose you have an app with images only, no text.

You can still have TTS functionality without showing any text.

<style type="text/css">

    .mainimage {
    max-width: 100%;
    }

    body {
    margin:0;
    }

    .hid {
        height: 0px;
        width: 0px;
        margin: 0;
        }

        .hid span{
        display:none;
        }
    </style>

   <img class="mainimage" src="./images/01deutsch.Resized.jpg" border=0  />

   <div class="hid">

            <span>This is hidden text,</span>

    </div>

The text must be a span inside a div of class “hid”, in this case.