Updating BookWidgets widgets inside of an iBooks Author project

God didn't create the world in a day, and scaling down to what most of us can achieve, writing a book in one shot is a challenge. At least for me it is. When I write, what initially flows from my fingers gets edited…  and re-edited… and re-edited… Somehow I expect I’m not the only one.  When it involves multi-touch books, the editing doesn’t only touch the text, pictures and the layout, but also its widgets.

Introducing the BookWidgets update book flow

There may be many reasons why you need to update your widgets after you’ve inserted them:

  • You found a more appealing picture, a better description or simply want to add a question.

  • Someone reported a  typo or another issue you just need to correct before too many students start making fun of you.

  • BookWidgets added feature XYZ to a widget in our latest release which you’re dying to include.

  • We’ve also written a bug or two in the past, sorry about those, and you need to apply a patch we provided to some widgets in your book. (If you ever hit something unexpected, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@bookwidgets.com, we’ll do our best to address issues ASAP, and if a fix is needed we can usually provide a patch quickly.)

 

Whatever the reason, there are different approaches when it comes to changing the widget in the book.

 

The standard way to update a widget is to first edit it outside of iBooks Author and then replace it inside of the book.  

 

 

Two ways to do that:

  • The slow way is to delete your old widget and insert your new one. Slow because you need to re-enter the text above & below, resize and reposition.

  • The better way is to use the inspector, select the widget tab and use the ‘Choose...’ button to update the widget itself, but keep everything else (surrounding text, layout, …) the same.

 

If you need to update multiple widgets, a much better option is to use the update book flow in the BookWidgets tool. This flow allows you to update or modify the BookWidgets widgets inside of your iBooks Author project file. The main advantages of using this are:

  • It’s faster:

    • Replace tedious file system browsing and iBooks Author search/replace with a quick access to the widgets in your book directly from BookWidgets

    • Update multiple widgets to a newer version in one go

  • It’s less error-prone: you can’t make mistakes while browsing your file system and selecting the widget to replace your current one.

Update the widgets in your book

I’ve broken it down in 7 steps, but most of them are small and quick so don’t get discouraged, it’s real easy and you will save a lot of time by using this.

 

  1. If your book is open in iBooks Author, close it.  iBooks Author saves your edits in the background, we want to be sure all are stored.

  2. Click ‘Update Book’ from the BookWidgets File menu and select your .iba file.  Opening large books may take some seconds.

  3. You will now see a list of all the BookWidgets widgets used inside of your book.

  4. By default all widgets are selected, so you can update all your widgets by clicking the ‘Update selected widgets’ button.  Reduce your selection prior to clicking the button if you only want to update a subset.

  5. To modify a specific widget, double-click it to bring up the widget configuration window.  Note the new buttons at the bottom. After making your widget edits, press the ‘Keep changes’ button.  Press the back arrow to move back to the widget list.

  6. After you made all required changes, press the ‘Save book’ button.  You’ll need to select a different name for your changed book when changing, I always append a version number (e.g. _v2)  to track my edits.  Saving may take some time.

  7. Close the book view by pressing ‘Close book’.

  8. You can now open your modified book in iBooks author to preview, export or publish.  Important: Before opening your exported book in iBooks, delete the previous version, if you don’t iBooks will open this instead of installing the new version.

Some limitations

  • When you insert a widget in a book, iBooks Author makes a copy of the cover image.  The update widget flow the cover image will only change the widget, not the cover image, so changes  made to the cover image setting inside of BookWidgets won’t be seen.

  • If you’ve made changes to an image (e.g. rotating / cropping) inside of BookWidgets, the book will only contain the processed image, not the original.  BookWidgets will only allow you to modify the image if it can find back the original, which usually means you’re editing your widgets on the machine you created them on, and you’ve not moved it.  

  • For the same reason, if you’re updating widgets created with a trial version of BookWidgets, BookWidgets will need access to the original image to remove the text overlay the trial version adds.

 

We’ve had this feature for quite some time and we’re using it all the time ourselves when testing new releases of our widgets inside of iBooks Author. It saves us lots of time and I hope it will do the same for you.  As always, for any questions don’t hesitate to contact me at support@bookwidgets.com.

Xavier Van Elsacker

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