Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

The iBooks app, too, with all the sexy page turning animation was written by one guy (before it became big).

As a UI developer with about 5 years of experience, that seems about right to me. I think I could have written that app given about 8 months. Heck, I suspect that the page turning animation was a relatively small part of the development.

I don't consider myself a fantastic developer either. I'd be suspicious of any developer with a few years experience who couldn't write an application like that given the right amount of time and motivation.

This isn't to belittle your comment, just that I'm thinking to myself "yeah, that sound correct".

I think more interesting than the fact that one guy wrote the entire application is that Apple gave one guy the time and space to create the application on his own.

“No, Apple didn’t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...

I don't remember the engineer's name. Mentioned at WWDC. Not the Delicious guy.

I'm sure he had tons of notes from Steve Jobs on the details though.

Am I the only person who hates that animation? This is about the only reason why I use Stanza, no animation to waste my time with.

I can't stand it either and I think Kindle has a better e-Book reader than Apple. Amazon did a good job at thinking, "this is not a book... this is not a book" where-as Apple brought all of the physical things from a book into an electronic application.

I bet a lot of the iPad target audience wants it to be close to a physical book. They aren't geeks.

I always think its a mistake when unnecessary physical metaphors are copied directly into software. The page flip, and pages around the content, are all completely unnecessary for eReaders to work. If the Kindle has proven anything, its that people don't need to see pages and page flips to understand how to go to the next screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com