In today’s iPad world, creating digital content for your readers pretty much involves owning a degree in computer science, or hiring someone who knows Objective-C and a bunch of web based languages. A patent filed on April 12, 2012, suggests that Apple’s experimenting with ways to eliminate the barrier to entry by creating a content authoring tool that would require zero knowledge of programming languages. The tool would ship with a bunch of templates for your content like an image carousel, map support, a grid view and a video carousel.
From the looks of it, the software bundle would be quite similar to and parallel Apple’s iBook Authoring tools released a couple of months ago during their education event in New York. Also, like the iBook Author tools recently released, it appears that an inspector widget would be available to anyone who was comfortable creating and editing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML.
If true, the tools could be very useful for creating digital magazines for the iPhone and iPad. I know a couple of people already thinking about abandoning websites for digital magazines entirely. The only hurdle between them accomplishing their dreams and being stuck on the web is the skillset and tools available for creating the content. This no-code authoring tool would be a huge step towards the realization of a life-long dream for some. It’s pretty exciting times for digital publishing.
Image Credit and Via Patently Apple
