uBooks - iPhone eBook Reader

I’m not mistaken if I say that the majority of mobile gadget users (phone / smartphone / PDA) have an application for reading books, and iPhone users are not deprived of them, and today I wanted to share a little story about the development of the uBooks application with Habr's readers - I hope , it will take its place among your applications.

Creating an application

Work on the application began a long time ago - this is our very first big project under iphone-os. Many studies have been done, because Objective-C language was a novelty to our developers, who switched to it from other languages ​​(C, C ++, etc.). Therefore, unfortunately, it took a lot of time to create the application.
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But, in order. The biggest and most capacious was to create a screen for reading a book with controls on it. The technology of page turning, which had to include both different variants of tap-zones, and the possibility of text autoscrolling, turned out to be very laborious. By the way, about autoscrolling - it is impossible to achieve completely smooth scrolling at low speed - pixel-by-pixel redrawing of the text still gives a kind of spasmodicity, therefore we have increased the minimum speed of autoscrolling. Auto-rotate the screen was also forcibly disabled - the accelerometer of the iphone is very sensitive, and with a slightly larger tilt of the screen the text rotated, which is inconvenient (especially uncomfortable when reading while lying down - and the text suddenly starts to turn).

Of course, it was necessary to tinker with the settings screens - a lot of elements needed to be beautifully placed:





Initially, a method was developed for uploading books to an application via the iphone file system, i.e. using third-party browsers. But we decided to play it safe, and not to tease the apple censors with this fact, so as not to prove later that these browsers are in the appstore (the same fileaid with reference to diskaid). And then we created the ability to upload books via a wi-fi connection, and via two protocols: http and ftp. (Honestly, the ability to load books through the file system remains - it is enough to follow this path - / var / mobile / Media / DCIM / uBooksLib :)) In the near future, we will supplement the fill options, without using a wi-fi connection.

Also in the near future, we will expand the supported formats of the books - html will be added to the existing .fb2 and .txt, and then there will be something else.

So, the development and testing of the first version of uBooks took several months ...

Maybe someone will be interested to know that in our application we used the following libraries:

• FTP (DiddyFtpServer) - for organizing an FTP server
• Cocoahttpserver - HTTP server
• FMDatabase - wrapper over SQLite.

Storm AppStore

At the approval stage, the local censors did not manage without an unpleasant surprise for us — at first our application was rejected. The reason for the reject was that we used unauthorized types of animation when turning the pages - our developers decided to make users enjoyable and added another 3 to the three publicly available animations taken from Apple's private frameworks. True, to the credit of the censors themselves, I must say that this review did not take 2 weeks or more, and only 9 days (in our other project, the censors examined the application for 21 days before they indicated that it was not so). Of course, we quickly removed the inappropriate elements and reloaded the binary. After another 10 days, our application was available in the appstore !

Personally, I can conclude that the apple has more close attention to the topic of the readers than a number of others (our other application is in the travel topic), or we are just lucky and uBooks fell into the hands of a faster apple worker.

Result

Now any of you can download our uBooks application for free (for now):
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331005526&mt=8

If you have any wishes and suggestions, we will be happy to consider them;)

PS In fact, I doubted which topic this article is more suitable for, so do not judge strictly if you find too much self-advertisement in the article