Planet Quark

Today a customer directed my attention to brilliantly created app from Atomic Antelope:
http://youtu.be/gew68Qj5kxw
(I have no further insight on how this app was created, I’d assume custom development.)

However that reminded me of a prototype I created for a customer last August:
He wanted to create a customer magazine for an aerospace manufacturer in which you could run a glass ball over a technical drawing by just tilting the iPad. And whenever the glass ball hit a certain hot spot of the drawing, a popup would appear that explained technical details.

To achieve that in Quark App Studio, which he used to create the interactive magazine, programming via the App Framework seemed to be overkill.

So I did some research and found out that you can use JavaScript to access the accelerometers of an iPad. And in App Studio you can of course embed (offline) HTML, so that within your app you can access the accelerometer of the iPad.

I found a ready-made JavaScript prototype here (http://www.albertosarullo.com/demos/accelerometer/) – thanks Alberto! – and it was a matter of seconds to embed that into an iPad issue with App Studio.
The result you can see here: mykiosk://www.quarkforums.com/appstudio/Gyrotest.zave (to get the URL working you need to tab it on a physical iPad and have the free Quark Issue Previewer installed first).

Shows again how standards (like HTML5 and JavaScript) can be great resources to help enhance iPad apps. And the example of Alice on the iPad shows how interactive effect can make the reader react to your app and provide additional value (or fun) to the reader. There’s nothing worse than having interactive effects that serve no purpose other than show the effect itself (remember “Skip Intro”?).

Popularity: 5% [?]