Some time ago, I started to write a book for someone. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to finish it, that someone got out of the tutorials/books business, so I ended up with a nice table of contents and a few chapters that I turned into individual articles. On the other hand, the thought of writing a book keeps haunting me, so I’ll probably write at least one or two small guides before I die (maybe more than just that, I’m don’t have any plans of dying anytime soon), but once the writing’s done… preparing the content for delivery may be a bit tricky with all these devices around, so this is where Laker steps into the spotlight.
Don’t look at its name, because Laker is not mistyped and has nothing to do with sports – the official mumbo-jumbo claims we’re facing “a compendium of files, frameworks, styles and tips for designing digital publications in HTML5” and I have nothing against it. After all, the thing that really matters is to distribute your work properly – in this case, you can use Laker to turn your book into an app for iPhone and iPad, featuring swipe for changing pages, double tap for showing the table of contents, the ability to include multimedia content like sounds, images, YouTube videos, as well as a bunch of other goodies.
Laker is open source and uses the Less Framework, its capabilities allowing you to easily build digital magazines, slideshows, catalogs, surveys and a bunch of other reading material. At last, you should keep in mind that you need a Mac and xCode for exporting the iPhone/iPad apps created using it, but Laker also allows you to create content for all modern browsers, as long as you don’t need to deliver iOS apps. Well… I guess that’s all and, if you ask me, I must say that Laker is one hell of a diploma thesis! 🙂
