Creating Touch friendly books in Drupal
I was using my wife’s Kindle the other day and thought: “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to make our online course texts function this way?” A few hours of Google searching for a viable solution and some code later and I present to you my results.
Quo.js stood out to me as the most robust solution for me to try out so I started (and so far ended) there. I then took this and made a small connector module so that the library could be used in Drupal. I’m sure there will be other sites, projects, and web-based apps that could function this way so I think a separate library integration makes the most sense.
Next I started working on getting Quo implemented just for Books. There were three ideas I initially had for gestures that would make sense for browsing a web-based textbook: Pinch to bookmark and swipe for previous / next page. These settings are configurable via the Drupal UI and you can watch their result below!
UPDATE: Hands on video of usage on iPad 2 and Droid X2
I hope to provide support for other touch-based events in the future but I’ll need to work through some of our courses on my tablet, cell phone, and other devices before I really can imagine what else is possible / logical to support.