Author Archives: tom

The Apple Tablet is announced… as the iPad

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After intense speculation and interest from bloggers, publishers and iPhone fans, today’s the day for the unveiling of the iPad, Apple’s latest device.  Unlike many announcements, this is an entirely new form factor, sitting squarely between the iPhone and Apple’s range of consumer and professional laptops in both size, power and portability.  Running on a new faster 1Ghz processor, it has a 9.7 inch screen and weighs 1.5 pounds, putting it into the same size level as the Kindle DX, leading to a potentially worrying time for Amazon.

It targets many different potential markets, but in the publishing world, aims squarely at the Kindle.  With its’ new built in iBookstore (similar to an iTunes store for books), it’s signing up with five partners initially – Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon&Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachett book group.

Unlike the Kindle however, the iPad has to deal with WiFi-only internet access on the basic models, being priced between $499-699 depending on storage options (16,32 and 64 GB), unlike Kindle’s built in WhisperNet which works anywhere there is a mobile signal, for free (having been paid for by Amazon).  Apple will offer a version including 3G mobile access, for an extra $129 per model, plus another $14-30 per month for a data plan from AT&T (in the U.S.).

More news on the international launch soon…

All will become clear…

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We havent written a post for ages. And I’ve just spent 20 mins deleting the million and one spammers that took advantage of our neglect! A big sarcastic thank you to you all (and one inparticlular) - I hope your fingers fall off :-)  

As I’m sure you can tell, the YUDU camp is deep in development and we promise it will all become clear soon… no one will be disappointed!

We’d love to hear your thoughts on features that you’d like to see – we’ve had some great ideas so far, a number of which have been added to our development plan.

Feedback

And just a quick reminder… the competition for a MacBook Air will be drawn in 20 days… if you haven’t entered then do it now!

Improving your documents with YUDU, How to add web links to your PDF files

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Whilst hopping in and out of our London and Clitheroe offices, I thought i’d post a quick blog to help users of YUDU Freedom with their PDFs.  I’ve received a lot of good feedback over the last month, and we’re working on changes to help people get better results (including accepting other formats).

This blog, however, is to do with web links, URLs, or whatever you may call them.  Because we’ve made YUDU Freedom so simple, the tools used typically to add these manually are no longer needed – instead, you can add them up front in your PDF file.

* Note that if you embed the fonts in your PDF file, and the text is something like www.something.com or someone@somewhere.com, our system will pick it up and link it automatically – .

However, the above doesn’t match all cases, as very often you might want to have a picture go to a website, or some text in a paragraph.  The PDF format allows you to add these additional links, and if you add them, we’ll automatically pick them up after you upload.

For instance, in Acrobat, you would open your PDF, click the link tool then drag out a region on the page you want to link.  Click ‘Open a Web Page’ in the dialog box that appears, type in the URL (or copy-paste), then click Ok.

When you upload that PDF (after saving it) to YUDU, we’ll link that area when it gets converted to Flash.  Easy!

If you haven’t currently got Acrobat, a free 30 day trial is available

YUDU, Sharing, and Development

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So we’re finally live with the new YUDU Freedom and it’s out there for people to use all over the world.  As the guy at YUDU dealing with new development that leaves me both excited and scared as people try it out :)

We’ve made a lot of changes with the new Freedom, and I hope you like them.  In particular, i’m really interested in gathering your feedback – I don’t consider a product ever finished and there’s always room for improvement for both publishers and readers.

We’re currently leveraging Java to deliver the software and process to you, and although the Freedom product is really easy to use, it’s simply the tip of an iceberg in terms of capability and features.  For more on the rest of the iceberg, see YUDU Pro.

New versions of our software are released every few months onto the YUDU servers, but based on some feedback and internal discussions, we’re looking at moving this to a much shorter, more agile development cycle, with new features arriving sooner – although they may need more testing from you if we deliver them like this!

Further to that, we’re looking into sharing features more and more, and would like to know how do you want to share your editions?  We currently have a drop down on all publications, letting you add them to Digg, Del.icio.us and Newsvine – do you want more like this? – Let us know! (we could drop in Add to Facebook to this list, for instance, for all of you people currently
[ reading | not supposed to be reading ] Facebook at work :) ).

Have any comments?  Leave them below!

Tom S.