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Thoughts from the Publisher

Building for the Future

Issue: 8.3 (March/April 2010)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: When RBD publisher Marc Zeedar was a kid he used to create magazines just for fun. Now he's doing it for a living! You may contact him at editor@RBDeveloper.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,552
Starting Page Number: 5
Article Number: 8300
Related Web Link(s):

http://www.rbdeveloper.com/articleindex.shtml

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iPad Survey

The future of digital publishing could soon be here with Apple's iPad. Our recent survey results provided fascinating insight into you, our readers. (Read more about the results on page 6.) My early conclusions:

• There's remarkable interest in iPad.

  At this time, there's no point in investing a lot of time and money to support proprietary iPad formats (i.e. a custom application).

  The current PDF design of RBD needs revising to be more screen-friendly.

With regards to the first item, I will test how well the iPad works as an ereader before I choose to do a redesign. I believe the current PDF edition is well-designed for print, but definitely isn't ideal for screen use. While I don't want to have to produce RBD in many formats, I am exploring some options. Currently RBD is also available in HTML, and I believe that can fairly easily be adapted into the EPUB format, which would work for iPad as well as other ereaders, so I may do that. So the future of RBD could look like the table in Figure 1, which I think would include a form that would satisfy almost everyone. What do you think?

New Online Index!

In other news, I have received requests for help finding articles within RBD's past issues. While we do offer our search application on CD, it's a separate product and doesn't work for mobile use. Google can be used to search the RBD website, but as the full articles aren't online, the results are incomplete.

As a simple solution, I have created an index available on the RBD website:

http://www.rbdeveloper.com/articleindex.shtml

This index isn't finished yet -- I have only indexed the last eight issues so far -- but I am thinking it's useful and would love your feedback.

I have purposely kept the format simple. The page is divided into two sections. The first lists all articles by Topic, the second by Author (the author section is complete, by the way; it's only the topics I'm still finishing). Each article heading tells you the article's RBD number, the full title, author, and indicates the article type (review, feature, or column). The link takes you to the article's page on the RBD website.

Let me know what you think of this, and if you find it useful.

In This Issue

Last issue there was mention that there were few game tutorials for REALbasic, so I have written one on building a fun word game (yes, I am a "Words With Friends" iPhone addict). Part two will follow next issue.

In the Something Different department, Bob Keeney and I have a little debate on whether or not REAL Software should add iPhone/iPad support for REALbasic. Vote in the poll for who you think won!

If you're a Microsoft Office user and have wondered how to control Word or Excel from REALbasic, Craig Boyd's shows you how by using those programs as reporting tools.

Finally, JC Cruz explains more than you ever wanted to know about XML DTD styles, and of course we've got our regular columns as always. Enjoy!

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