I am trying to find a prototyping tool that is in between the physical world (workshops for example) and programming an html/css/js version from scratch; which is my inclination, but a dangerous road which I believe the professors I have met with are warning me against.
I am choosing an environment to capture the poems I write in my notebook, and I would like that environment to also be somewhere that I can explore and test out ideas for what the poems might be like in the digital interactive world.
I am going to try iBooks which comes stock on Mac computers and produces structured digital books easily.
I do not love the constraints and proprietary format of the iBooks platform, but I think it might give me some good structure for the capture and prototyping phase of the thesis development project.
I am starting by writing the poems up in plain text in an application called scrivener{{link}}, where I write and keep larger text data and writing projects.
Rough start
I got some work happening in iBooks Author, but it seems like it might be more appropriate for a place to capture and structure the poetic work, more then prototype interaction and animated design. I next went to try prototyping in keynote, which was a helpful step in starting to imagine some of the motion, but the magic move trick which is very useful and powerful in keynote takes much more work to imagine ‘living text’ possibilities then using a javascript library (I think).
Ibooks author is also supposed to play well with keynote, so I was hoping I would be able to embed in the keynote prototype easily into the iBooks author, but again, an iBooks error
I was able to figure it out with some internet searching (which iBooks Author requires far too much to be a truly useful workflow solution).
I will try to embed or link the ibooks author prototype version here. I may continue building the outline/structure of the interactive poetry book I am imagining for my thesis, but for prototyping and creating some material for user testing and feedback I am going to move on to setting up a programming environment to experiment with digital poetry.
You can download and view the ibook here