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In our series of how-to videos, we have come to the promising title Organized madness. It could have been called, like the video itself, Using workspaces to organize your content creation – but that sounded somewhat boring. In any case, the video below explains a really simple feature to help you keep track of your creative projects:

To put it simple, every workspace has a separate set of content in all tabs. This has proved really helpful in keeping track of content and making it findable, while not having to mess around with folders all the time. If you’d like to add another level of tidiness, you might like to use tags/labels. Then you can also filter on a given label within the workspace. Maybe we should make a small video to show you that later. Watch this space!

If you have questions above the feature shown above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to shout out to let us know.

In our series of how-to videos, today’s feature is one that can be used in many different types of titles, but the most obvious might be for educational ones. If the title is based on a textbook, you might want to have a carousel of videos and images where the printed books have a single static image. You find the video showing how you can do this embedded below.

That was pretty easy!? If you have any comments, let us know. Until then, please keep experimenting with the tool and we’ll be back with more practical videos the coming weeks. Please check back!

Continuing our little series with info on our team, today we (Sondre, the CEO, to be specific) have the pleasure to write a few words about Fredrik. I have worked with Fredrik before, in the management consulting industry.

Therefore, I was more than happy when he decided to cut his salary to come change the world (or at least have fun in a little part of it, improving entertainment and education for children by providing our great cloud-based apps publishing tool – thanks for letting me plug it!).

Let’s see what Fredrik filled in about himself (in one of the very few forms of our firm!):

Name: Fredrik Medby Hagen

Title: Jack of most trades

Specialties: All things IT; requirement specifications, systems design & development,  testing, project-/program-management, IT-strategies etc.

Background: MSc in computer science (NTNU) and employment at small and large consultancies, doing all kinds of IT-related work within the sectors of gaming, telco, media, power&utilities, insurance, banking and health.

Fun fact: In the good old days, I used to nurture my creative side by playing around with trackers and sequencers. Some of my music was actually released (albeit after being remixed by this guy).

In our series of how-to videos, we will today show a really useful feature that does not apply to the end user, but is very helpful in the authoring tool. Zoom. Have a look below!

This feature is often used for zooming in and making sure the details are pixel perfect, for instance when working with a dynamic overlay. The feature should not be confused with the ZoomTo interaction types we also offer (these are shown the end user) that can be used for creating exciting effects – let us get back to that in a later video.

If you have questions above the feature above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.

In our series of how-to videos, we will today show a commonly used feature – namely adding a sound that plays when the user taps a specific area of a page. You can see the video below.

This feature is often used for adding sound effects (children love to repeatedly press to hear water fall, cars start and maybe even animals fart…). Another common use is for guidance or language training in educational titles. In a later video, we will see how even more advanced interactions can be created by using layers (stored in what we call object categories). This way some of our customers lets the user switch between different sets of active sound effects.

If you have questions above the feature above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.

To continue our little series with info on our team, we today let our CEO and Founder sneak in a word or two (to be honest that happens more often than not anyway!).

If it is at all possible to be risk-adverse as a Founder of a startup, Sondre says claims he is – and has been able to steer the company to a profit every year since its founding.

Title: CEO and Founder

Specialities: As a founder of a startup you cannot really afford to have specialities, so I guess mine is that I never feel I am too good for any type of work that needs to be done. I do my share of technical architecture, bookkeeping & invoicing, server maintenance, sales, programming, customer support and product management and enjoy it a lot.

Background: MSc in computer science (NTNU) and MBA in technology management (NTNU, MIT Sloan). Back in the days I also earned a 2nd Lt’s star on the shoulder in the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

Fun fact: I once travelled with train from Moscow to Beijing via Siberia and Mongolia and swam in the manhood-shrinking lake Baikal (13 degrees Celsius!) enroute…

In our series of how-to videos, we have come to a commonly used feature – namely adding a sound that plays when the user is entering a page. You can see the video below.

This feature is often used for having an actor read text in a children’s book or give an intro to interactions available in a page of learning. In a later video, we will see how this can also be automated for a large number of pages using our import feature.

If you have questions above the feature above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.

As promised, we are kicking off our series of how-to videos that will run through autumn and likely the (way too long) winter. Our aim is for the videos to be simple enough to be used to learn brand new functionality, and they are a super reference resource if you participated in one of our workshop, but can’t quite seem to remember exactly how to complete a certain task.

This very first video will give you a very quick introduction to the user interface of the tool. It will lead you into the project tab, which is where you will enjoy spending most of your time using our tool. Have a look:

If you have suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.

We are going to do a little series of info on our team. We start off with the developer (not counting our CEO) that has been with us the longest, Luci.

Name: Lucian Corduneanu

Title: Software Developer

Specialties: Proud to be first developer hired. I had the pleasure to work with Sondre, who is a great mentor and teacher. Now we have a bigger team and I’m doing the local coordination and support as needed. I have experience building frontend systems with java, GWT, smartGWT, HTML, CSS, JS as well as backend systems with java, jsp, hibernate, mySQL

Background: “Politehnica”, Automation and Computer Science Faculty, Timisoara, Romania. Cisco CCNA.

Fun fact: I was riding my bike, through a nearby park, which is typically full of children playing, thus, with moderate speed. I had my phone in the right hand talking, when a cute little girl cut my way. I had to use my left hand for a quick break, but the speed was optimal for a perfect flip over the front wheel type of fall. Nobody, except me was hurt, so use the left hand to talk while riding the bike.

We all enjoy playing around with TapBookAuthor, exploring its feature-set on our own, but now and then, we just want a quick and easy to understand solution. So to ensure that you get the most out of TapBookAuthor, we are in the process of creating some easy-to-follow how-to videos to explain usage scenarios and stuff you can do with TapBookAuthor.

In addition to this, you will see text-articles explaining the more advanced concepts coming your way. Some of these articles might be written by the TapBookAuthor-community (or based on the stuff we are surprised when we see you do) – in many cases, you have done way cooler stuff with our tool than we had dreamt of.

Our ambition is to have at least a two digit number of useful howto-videos live before we see snow in Norway (which may be earlier than you would guess!) and certainly over 25 by the end of 2013. Keep coming back here to see them as they are published. We will tag them all with a specific tag and category, making it super-simple to find a listing. And you can also get the videos from the YouTube channel or directly from the video listing on our web page.

I have always envied blog posts talking about their “award winning” products, but now we are able to do it ourselves! 🙂

TapBookAuthor.com and its founder got the annual entrepreneurship price from one of the most prestigous law firms in Norway, and thus we can understand why Sondre is smiling below:

On May 16th, we held our very first user-forum in Oslo. Almost all our customers were attending for an crammed two hour session in the lovely library at Aschehoug in Oslo.

Thank you, Aschehoug for hosting the event! Sondre, our CEO, went through the new features of the next release of TapBookAuthor.com. Thanks to our simple subscription model, all these awesome features will be available to all subscribers as the new version is deployed.

After the presentation of new features, a round-table discussion was held to shed light on how our customers use TapBookAuthor; what works and what can be improved. Many good ideas were discussed and the TapBookAuthor crew got loads of new inspiration for the near, and long-term roadmap.

One of the demos held was for Samlaget’s Leseland app that was about to be released for both Windows, Android and of course all the iPads out there. This app used both the in-app-purchasing that was added to the tool this winter, the read-along (aka “karaoke mode”) function as well of activation of different sets (“layers”) of sounds and effects according to user selections. You can see a screenshot from the app (yep, the roof is indeed leaking – using the animation feature!) attached to this post. Click the image to see it full size.

Thanks to our users who attended the user forum meeting – and we hope it will be even more next time around!

We are thrilled to launch the official TapBookAuthor blog! This will be the one-stop-shop for 1st hand information on the TapBookAuthor.com tool and the latest on what we are up to.

We will use this blog to inform you on the latest features implemented in our tool and updates on our planned roadmap ahead. We will also publish various news bulletins on what’s going on, some HOWTO-videos on how to use the tool, info from conferences we attend, talk about our planned user forum meetings, as well as general info on our business as it develops.

We are very excited to have come this far, and we look forward to sharing our thoughts and ideas here with you in the time to come. Stay tuned!

Best regards,
Fredrik and Sondre w/team

In our series of how-to videos, we will today show a really useful feature that does not apply to the end user, but is very helpful in the authoring tool. Undo and redo. Have a look below to see how this works.

This feature was completed in the spring of 2013 and together with real time feature (covered in a different video), this helps improving your productivity in the authoring tool.

If you have questions above the feature above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.

Today Dagbladet, the second largest Norwegian tabloid newspaper, wrote about two children apps. They usually write about apps for children about once per month. But what was special for us about the reviews this time? In fact both the apps featured were made with our tool!

The apps in question are both using the possibility of creating a brand-specific channel to the customer, using in-app-purchasing – a feature in our tool for somewhat more than half a year now. And the consumer gets a title for free, to evaluate before paying a single dime. Classical win-win?

Leseland from Samlaget helps people learn to read, with four different levels of difficulty, and uses the “karaoke mode” to highlight text along with a very slow voice. The entire logic of the menu, selection of different voices and images they did with absolutely no help from us, just using the standard features of the tool. Fun for us to see, even if we also like to help customers that prefer to be less hands-on.

Lesestart from Gyldendal is a similar bookshelf with a broader range of titles and a very polished bookshelf-with-store concept with what I personally think is a super looking design and great user experience.

You can see part of the page from the newspaper here, and a similar article is now also online. The titles are in Norwegian.

In our series of how-to videos, we will today show you a video that covers how to hide and show an entire set of objects at the same time. You’ll find the video embedded below.

Not too hard, I think? We also have videos on working with layers in general. A tip is to click the HOWTO category below to see the growing list of practical how-to videos.

If you have questions above the feature shown above or suggestions about new videos topics we should cover, be sure to let us know.