“Classics” is a great product, it shows us iPhone developers what an elegant ebook reader can be, so I bought it almost instantly after it’s released. I’ve been chatting with my friends about this app for a while, now I’d like to give a more closer examination to it from the perspective of a typographer and a programmer. Especially its weaknesses.

Illustrated by my favorite graphic designer, David Lanham, Classics tries its best to provide a traditional book reading experience (that’s why it’s called “Classics”). It contains the following books, even I’ve read most of them in Chinese long time ago, thanks to Classics, it’s still a fascinating experience to read them again in English:

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens [Added in version 1.1]
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

However, there are still some details to be improved.

First of all, Classics shows the entire interface in a portrait way, it’s more like traditional books, but has an unavoidable drawback: the iPhone/iPod Touch screen is not wide enough, if you make the characters large enough (otherwise people won’t be able to read them clearly), breaking paragraphs into lines will be extraordinarily hard, you either have to introduce a lot of hyphens, or make the word spacing too loose or too tight. From the following screenshot, we can see Classics made both mistakes.

The spots I marked made the reading experience much worse, if you’re a picky reader like me. And it happens on almost every pages! So why, why couldn’t Classics support landscape mode to improve the situation a little bit?

To understand this, we must first find out how Classics is implemented. Let’s take a look (yeah I know I shouldn’t do such reverse-engineering, but I just can’t help). First, copy it from where it’s saved, expand it as a zip archive:

$ cp ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile\ Applications/Classics\ 1.1.ipa classics.zip
$ unzip classics.zip
    Archive:  classics.zip
   creating: Payload/
   creating: Payload/Classics.app/
   creating: Payload/Classics.app/20,000 Leagues.classic/
  inflating: Payload/Classics.app/20,000 Leagues.classic/0.pdf  
  inflating: Payload/Classics.app/20,000 Leagues.classic/1.pdf  
 ...
  inflating: iTunesMetadata.plist    
  inflating: Payload/Classics.app/SC_Info/Classics.sinf  
  inflating: iTunesArtwork           
finishing deferred symbolic links:
  Payload/Classics.app/CodeResources -> _CodeSignature/CodeResources

OK, now it’s clearer, let’s open up Finder so that you can see it in a more structured way:

See? It turns out every book Classics loads and displays:

1. Is a .classic ended directory with PDFs for each chapter,
2. Contains a Info.plist describes it,
3. Has a cover image called Art.png.

Let’s first look at one of these plists,

$ cd Payload/Classics.app/A\ Christmas\ Carol.classic
$ plutil -convert xml1 Info.plist -o -
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" 
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>author</key>
    <string>Charles Dickens</string>
    <key>language</key>
    <string>English</string>
    <key>sections</key>
    <array>
        <string>Preface</string>
        <string>Marley’s Ghost</string>
        <string>The First of the Three Spirits</string>
        <string>The Second of the Three Spirits</string>
        <string>The Last of the Spirits</string>
        <string>The End of It</string>
    </array>
    <key>title</key>
    <string>A Christmas Carol</string>
    <key>year</key>
    <string>1843</string>
</dict>
</plist>

So the file contains sufficient metadata for Classics to load this book, but it seems quite “preliminary”, thus, not flexible enough IMHO. For instance, PDF files must be named from 0 to n, each corresponds to a chapter (0 → Preface, 1 → Marley’s Ghost, etc.)

And then, how are these PDFs look? Here is a screenshot taken from Quick Look. pdffonts and pdfinfo from xpdf can give us more information:

$ pdfinfo 0.pdf 
Title:          untitled4
Author:         Phillip Ryu
Creator:        Pages
Producer:       Mac OS X 10.5.4 Quartz PDFContext
CreationDate:   Fri Nov 14 00:12:37 2008
ModDate:        Fri Nov 14 00:12:37 2008
Tagged:         no
Pages:          2
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      216 x 316.8 pts
File size:      27175 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.3

So it’s typesetted manually by Phillip Ryu with Pages, doesn’t sound very high-tech, huh?

$ pdffonts 0.pdf 
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
VLFBFB+Georgia                       TrueType          yes yes no      10  0
LMPSPR+Georgia-Bold                  TrueType          yes yes no       9  0
BXMTAW+Georgia-Italic                TrueType          yes yes no      19  0

Yeah, the only font family used is Georgia. To admit, I was actually hoping some fonts more suitable for book typesetting, say, Garamond or Sabon.

Enough said, now we have a better understanding of the internal architecture of Classics. As we can see, using PDF for all the books is the chief decision that affects the rest of the app. There are pros and cons for this decision.

Pros:

1. No need to calculate the layout when the user is reading, thus loading a new page will be generally faster than a book reader that loading text and doing layout dynamically.
2. With PDF, one can embeded arbitrary fonts as wish, bypassing iPhone’s limitation. (Classics does not make use of this advantage, sadly.)

Cons:

1. The layout is fixed, no way to adapt it to a screen in landscape mode.
2. Loading PDF through iPhone still has noticeable sluggish, thus, you can’t tap a chapter and have it shown instantly. The worse thing is, there is no way for the developer to optimize it, as long as they still use Apple’s frameworks for PDF rendering.

Except for this, is there anything else can be improved? Yes,

• After compressed, Classics is a 22M beast. Downloading it in bad bandwidth condition can be a problem, not to mention every once it’s updated, you have to download 22M (or even more) again, while most of them you downloaded are just duplicated resource files you already had!

  Even though we can see it greatly simplified application deployment, this part can certainly be improved. For instance, instead of bundle these books with the app, setup a site for it to retrieve books dynamically, books can be downloaded the first time user tries to read, and cached in his Documents directory.

• Pages is definitely not a serious typesetting tool. If I were Phillip¹, I’ll try to build an automatic conversion infrastructure with XeTeX, it will be much easier to maintain, and gives noticeably better text layout results, especially on line breaking, I suspect.

可以参考的还有：Mac OS X Keybindings, Usable Selectors for Cocoa Key Bindings 和 Default Mac OS X System Key Bindings.

可惜还是不能解决它下层的键映射问题，比如右 enter 的作用，fn 键，等等。

w3c 近期的一些 presentation，多为介绍技术的趋势，宣讲一些大家平时不大注意的东西，我选了几个不太酸的，有时间不妨看看：

• Tutorial: Ruby Markup and Styling, Ruby 标记的使用教程，International 工作组刚刚提供的一个教程，这个东西和汉语的关系也比较大，加上实用性较高，可以了解一下。
• The device-independent browser: CSS and grid layout, 副标题叫做“CSS 布局的过去、现在与未来”，演讲者是 CSS 的创建者之一 Bert Bos，核心是介绍 CSS3 中的网格式布局 (grid layout) 方式。
• An Introduction to Writing Systems, 多种书写系统的异同，及其带来的问题。这个演讲比较长，不过对东亚、拉丁、阿拉伯等各种书写系统在 Web 上的呈现有比较详尽叙述，也涉及一些 Unicode 的内容，与此有兴趣的朋友可以读读。
• XHTML & XForms, 这个演讲主要是介绍下一代的 XHTML 在语义表达方面的改进。

定位总是一个热门话题，近来，Tommy 的两篇文章：Relatively Absolute 和 Float Layouts 相信能给你一点启发。

Marek 的 CSS Workshop，介绍关于 CSS 的有趣实践，比如纯粹用 CSS 做一个 W3C 的验证标志，给水平线 <hr /> 设定样式等。

Roger 的 Quotations and citations: quoting text 是关于如何正确地在 (X)HTML 中引用别人的文本的一篇解释性文章，而他的 The alt and title attributes 则是就 alt 和 title 属性的正确使用这个老话题而写的。Dave Shea 说得不错，Roger 完全可以就如何正确使用标记写本书了。

最近一期 ALA 的 Invasion of the Body Switchers 是先前流行的 Paul Sowden 版本样式表切换器的一个更新版本，更关心与亲和力方面的应用。

来自 Mozilla 方面的消息，则是 Thunderbird 和 Nvu 分别发布了 1.0 版本和 0.6 版本，不过似乎 nvu 还没有成为 mozilla 的 HTML 编辑器的下一代版本，或许它更愿意作为一个独立软件提供？

时间有限，不得不在这里打住。

这是 Eric 新近设计的一套用 XHTML 书写内容，用 CSS 控制外观，通过 DOM 脚本控制页面的切换与步进等功能的，完全符合 Web 标准的幻灯片设计工具。尽管先前有许多设计师们 (比如在新近召开的 WE04，我们就看到了 Doug Bowman 和 Dave Shea 的 presentation) 都做过类似的尝试，但通常他们只为了在一个浏览器下使用，也往往有一些亲和力的问题。

Eric 的这次尝试，就是希望能将它较好的用于各个浏览器上，包括 Mozilla、IE、Opera，同时保证与标准良好的结合及不妨碍亲和力。

最近与之类似的东东，还有这个，也可以看看。