AZARDI 8 Released

AZARDI 8 is now available at azardi.infogridpacific.com. This is the first release with auto updating. Mac and Linux will silently update. For those with AZARDI 7, Windows 7 may ask for permission and show an unsigned/unknown publisher box.

This is a relatively low-key upgrade. We have a lot more features planned for the next release based on requests and recommendations from users, and to address the demands of digital content.

The main changes and updates

XUL-Runner Version 8. The framework is now aligned with all the features of Mozilla Firefox 8. This makes hyphenation in a wide range of languages possible if the CSS includes the hyphens property.

Version Button. AZARDI now has a version information button to match the auto-update feature. This can be used to check the current version and access the online license information.

Image Viewer. Clicking on any image opens an image view window. You can then use the mouse scroll button to zoom in on any image thanks to iScroll by Matteo Spinelli  . Panning around the image is done by holding the left mouse key and swishing (I am scared to say "swipe" in case the word has been patented) left, right, up and of course down to move the image around in the viewport. 

Covers. If cover images are available in an ePub3 they can be viewed from a fixed link in the Tables of Content. This means cover images are still available from the reader, even if in ePub 3 they are not included in the spine.

Multi-language Hyphenation. If your ePub is correctly declaring the language in the XHTML file, language specific hyphenation will be applied if CSS -moz-hyphens: auto; is applied.

AZARDI Interactive Engine. There are some significant upgrades here. AIE now supports QAA-Set, Flashcards, Interactive Tutorials and has had some bug-fixes and fine-tuning improvements. Specific demonstrations of these will follow shortly and should be of interest for education, learning and training publishers.

Bug-fixes. RTL content now displays aligned correctly in the roll-out Contents.

WebApp Version

The parallel channel managed content WebApps for iPhone and Android are in testing  and will be available mid January. These use the same powerful IGP:FoundationXHTML package and AZARDI Interactive Engine used in the desktop AZARDI reader.

The WebApps do not have a product name as they are part of the IGP:Content Fulfilment Framework. This allows business with catalogues of books as well as individual updated books within catalogues. The design is course, grade, semester oriented to allow the easy delivery of the same content with the same interactive features to any platform anywhere.

The WebApp versions use the same rights framework as AZARDI for subscription content control for distribution to institutions and other secure channel content delivery.  This means the same content can be delivered Online, via WebApps and to all desktop platforms in AZARDI. Of course IGP:Digital Publisher lets you make ePubs for the various e-Retailers as well but it is unlikely they will be able to support the depth of interactivity in the IGP content family.

This means for the first time the same digital content production source can be used seamlessly without publishers having to worry about user platforms (except Windows 7.5 of course!).

Comments

[Laisvunas]

Hi Richard,

Healthy, happy and creative New Year for you and your family!

Several ideas regarding AZARDI 8:

1) It seems that userguide does not cover AZARDI 8 features. E.g. AZARDI 8 has mysterious "Landmarks" button, but it is not described in userguide.

2) Clicking "Library" button results into closing of the opened publication. If the user wants to return back, he must find the publication in the list, doubleclick it and wait until publication will be loaded again. Clicking "Library" button does not imply the wish to close the publication, so there should be an easy way to return back.

3) Clicking "Next" button in the screen having vertical scrollbar quite often results into resizing of AZARDI window in case the new chapter is being loaded as the result (it seems that AZARDI tries to load new chapter in a window without vertical scrollbar). This behaviour seems to be wrong. Imagine several AZARDI instances being opened side by side and displaying different publications. In such case loading new chapter in one publication will result into its window resized and covering part of the other publication's window.

4) When AZARDI userguide is opened, the window has "Font size", "Margin space", "Line space" etc. buttons on the left, but when "EPUB 3 Unleashed" is opened all these buttons are disabled. It seems that this behavior depends on certain options available to publication authors. It would be interesting to read exhaustive documentation on those options.

5) It would be nice if exhaustive change log would be available to those who are more deeply interested in AZARDI.

[Marc Grober]

As I mentioned in e-mail in 8.0 using the version button under OSX 10.6 seems to freeze the app. Additional playing indicates that it will produce the licensing page after almost a minute wait. No success yet in recovering from this page yet. In other words, while he app may not be broken, the time delays are so very long that no one will wait for the app to respond.

[Marc Grober]

There is also no apparent way to exit the app, as there is no exit icon in the app, and the menu bar if clicked highlights the word AZARD, and nothing else happens.....