People are always looking for the next thing--the next trend, the next technology, the next market--and for a lot of people, the next thing is apps. Apps for everything. And picture book apps are getting more popular. They move, they play, they read aloud...the possibilities are endless. Okay, they're not endless, but you get the point. There are some seriously amazing things you can do with apps.
Children's books are the perfect print medium to take the plunge into app conversion. They're image based, playful by nature, and full of imagination. Not to mention, the interactivity is great for exploration and discovery. With all of that going on, it's no wonder children's book apps are the new thing we keep hearing about.
And as you may have heard,
Scarletta is publishing our
first picture book this spring. And not only that, but the book is also in the process of becoming an app. That's right,
Nalah and the Pink Tiger will be available as a bilingual app, in English and Spanish, for the iPad! But as exciting as that is--and it's pretty darn exciting--I found myself wondering just what goes into making an app. And since we're lucky enough to have the
people who do this sort of thing in our same office, I only had to walk about twenty steps to find the Nalah app designer, Kelly, and ask her some questions.
First things first, there are multiple programs that you can use to develop apps. We happen to use a version of Adobe called
DPS (or digital publishing suite) that allows you to create the layouts and animations right in Adobe. So we take the
inDesign files originally created for printing, and within DPS we can add all the animations and sounds right to the original pages. We just have to make sure that the spreads are proportionate to the iPad screen, and off we go.
