Aside from having a acim bookstore and a good iPad children’s book app developer, you’ll need some interactive elements in order to self publish and get your children’s book approved as an app. If not, you’ll be told to publish your book as an iBook. Besides, the iPad can do so much more for your children’s book than just plain text and pictures. With that in mind, there are some key elements that you’ll need to work on in order to give your iPad children’s book developer a clearer idea of how you want your iPad children’s book app to appear and function.
The steps outlined below will provide a solid foundation for you to work with an iPad children’s book app developer to complete your app. You should be able to do quite a bit of the work on your own using a graphics program such as PhotoShop, PhotoPaint, etc., a text file editor such as Wordpad or MS Word, and a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel.
For each file you create for your iPad children’s book app, it’s important to begin with, and stick with, a good file naming structure. For example, if your app is called “MyApp”, and you have an image of a rabbit on page 3, then you’ll want to name that file something like “MyApp_rabbit_1_page3_xxyyzz.png”, where xxyyzz is month/day/year. This becomes even more important when you have many images, or many revisions of images to work with. Otherwise it’s very difficult for everyone involved to be sure they’re working with the correct image.
1) Create a text file containing the text for your story, broken down into sections for each individual page of your app. This can also a good place to add notes for each page to help your iPad children’s book developer during development. You can choose to add your notes to this text file, or a better method is to create a separate Excel spreadsheet that details each page in your iPad children’s book app.
2) Create a rough storyboard for each page in your iPad children’s book app. These pages would include the startup splash screen, title page, index page, help page, story pages, etc. Each page should be a rough pencil sketch of the background art, characters, objects, and text. The purpose is to get a rough idea of how everything is going to fit on the page, and how the pages will flow together. The background images should be 1024×768 pixels in size, PNG format, enough to fill the iPad screen.
3) Once you have your first storyboard pages completed, identify elements, characters, etc. that you’d like to be interactive or animated. These items will need to be drawn as separate images later to be able to animate them. For example, you may want to be able to touch a ball and have it bounce across the screen. To do this, the ball needs to be drawn as a separate image with a transparent background so your iPad children’s book app developer can animate the ball. The typical file format for these images are PNG, and the size should generally be the size that you need on the iPad screen ( relative to the 1024×768 background image ). Sometimes you may want items created in a larger scale, if you for example want to be able to make the item larger when touching it, etc. Having your iPad children’s book app developer working with you at this stage is ideal, as they can help you identify the best ways to animate and interact with your iPad children’s book app.
4) Once you’ve worked out all the items you’d like to interact with or animate, now it’s time to complete the color background images for each page in your iPad children’s book app. This will also help you to choose the color and placement of text, characters, and other elements that you’ll use in your iPad children’s book app.
5) Now that your background images are ready, it’s time to work on the characters and other items in your iPad children’s book app. These items are placed on the iPad screen in layers. So think of your background image as layer 1, and then your other items are added in layers on top of that layer. For example, for a character to sit on a chair and have both animated, the chair and character would need to be separate images. The background image is placed on layer 1, the chair on layer 2, and the character on layer 3. That way the character is in the foreground, and the chair is behind it. You can use as many layers as you need.
