Apple’s much-anticipated tablet computer, the iPad, has arrived. It looks great, but there are two problems from my point of view. I’d love to be able to use all my Mac software on it, but it doesn’t run the full OS X, just the iPhone OS. No great surprise - the iPhone OS is designed for keyboardless portable devices and has been developed to run on low-power, high-performance ARM processors. Also, Apple don’t want to sell the iPad at the expense of their laptops.

The other problem is that the ebook format they will be supporting on the iBookstore is ePub. This makes sense for simple books and possibly newspapers but it’s no good for my books. ePub is a reflowable format based on XHTML. This just won’t work for most of my books. The Bibliomania or Book-Madness, for instance, has end-notes to the footnotes. Try doing that in ePub format.

I have signed up for another Open University course. I’m a great fan of their teaching materials, at least the printed stuff. With their E303 course (English Grammar in Context), they include an ‘activities’ CD-ROM which achieves something quite incredible. It is a simple interactive presentation created in the Adobe Director. Director is a cross-platform tool and yet the OU’s presentation is Windows only. Not only that but it will run in XP but not in Windows Vista. I’ve been slow installing Windows 7 so I don’t know if it works in that, but I doubt it.

These pages, as I have mentioned elsewhere, are produced using the excellent RapidWeaver program. One of the most useful plug-ins for this is the recently-introduced Stacks from Your Head Software. One of the best things about RapidWeaver, and in turn Stacks, is that they have spawned third-party development. For instance, the appearance of Stacks has encouraged a whole new wave of products, including a Stacks version of John Malinowski’s RapidBook, a very neat way of putting sample pages of one’s books on the internet. RapidBook for Stacks was developed by Phil Warrender and is a remarkable example of the sort of collaboration which occurs in the RapidWeaver environment: RapidWeaver create the basic web design program, Your Head create Stacks, John Malinowski creates Rapid book for Blocks (another Your Head plug-in), and Phil Warrender adapts RapidBook for Stacks. My first attempts are here, here and here. You need Flash to view them