Interview with the creator of Books.app for iPhone

Posted by dennis on August 27th, 2007 at 06:49am Comments

Today we’re opening a new interview series here at iPhone World. They will be focused on the underground programmers community that’s been working relentlessly to release unauthorized by Apple and yet very useful free applications for the iPhone community.

Our first guest is Zachary Brewster-Geisz. He’s the creator of Books.app eBook reader for the iPhone, which was downloaded over 550 times from our servers alone. You can see his personal website at http://www.zacharybrewstergeisz.com.

Zachary Brewster-Geisz

iW: Hi Zach, please introduce yourself, our readers would surely like to hear a short bio.
ZBG: Well, I’m a professional father, who also is an independent filmmaker, occasional actor, and hobbyist programmer. I was a computer science minor in college (although I never actually finished that degree–don’t tell anyone) and was probably the only person in America who couldn’t get a job at a start-up during the dot-com boom–I spent it working backstage at theaters instead. I live in suburban Maryland with my wife, two kids, two cats, and one very hyper dog.

iW: What made you choose the iPhone as a platform to write programs for? There are so many other mobiles out there…
ZBG: Well, since I’ve been using Macs since 1984, unabashed Apple fanboyism probably has a lot to do with it. I’ve done a bit of Cocoa/Objective-C programming for Mac OS X in the past, so I was delighted to see that the iPhone’s underlying “guts” were based on that platform, and that meant I could pick it up relatively quickly. Finally, I had done a _tiny_ bit of hacking in iPod Linux, as well as other ARM-based platforms like the Linksys NSLU2, so my appetite was already whetted for Mac OS X on ARM.

iW: Books.app is an incredible program, especially so because it’s not supposed to work on the iPhone (according to Apple who supposedly ‘blocked out’ third party iPhone programmers), and yet it came out so soon. Was it hard to program it?
ZBG: Not in the least, and I say that not because I’m an incredible programmer–I am emphatically not–but because the hacking community is so open to sharing code and techniques. Certainly for the first version of Books.app, all I did was steal the FileBrowser code from iphonenes (http://iphonenes.googlecode.com/) and adapted some text viewing code which was provided by Erica Sadun of TUAW.com. And let’s face it, writing an eBook reader is a hell of a lot simpler than writing some of the other programs that have popped up.

iW: Why do you think Apple neglected to include an eBook reader with the iPhone, then?
ZBG: If I had to guess–and that’s all it is, a guess–I’d simply say the market isn’t big enough. For most cases, reading books over the Web is adequate, especially if you find a site like manybooks.net, which provides books in mobile-friendly format. Also, unlike the iPod, the iPhone doesn’t appear as a hard drive on your desktop, so there’d be no Apple-sanctioned way to get the books to the phone–unless there was an eBooks section in the iTunes Store, I suppose.

iW: What do you think about the whole “no third party programs” stance by Apple, which obviously doesn’t work? A thing that crossed our mind here at iPhone World is that Apple possibly decided to play on the the “underground iPhone hacker” image as a way to promote it (since otherwise it’s hard to explain why the device got both hacked and unlocked so fast).
ZBG: It’s possible, and it certainly would explain why Apple seems to have taken a “live and let live” attitude thus far. Personally, I can understand their decision. I’m betting the (internal) iPhone API is subject to change, and that soon–possibly even as soon as Leopard comes out–they will, in fact, open up the phone. I don’t have any evidence for that, just a gut feeling.

Books.app
iW: What are your future plans for Books.app? What could we expect in final v1.0 release?
ZBG: Funny you should ask, I’ve been thinking I should figure that out myself. Let’s see….
* deletion of books directly from the interface
* arbitrary folders within the EBooks folder, so you can group books by genre, author, etc.
* a preferences pane to allow you to choose a different font, inverted text mode (white on black), and some other stuff
* a global memory for each book file, so it remembers where you were in every chapter of every book; this would allow you to read multiple books at once
* some sort of one-touch scrolling/paging system
* bookmarking!
* chapter forward/chapter back buttons in the reading screen

In addition, I plan to code an application for Mac OS X to automate the HTML conversion, chapter splitting, and file transfer process, which will also be free and released under the GPL.

The great thing about open source is that I might not have to do all that myself. For instance, Chris Born, who designed Books.app’s icon, has told me he’s working on a preferences pane right now.

iW: The underground iPhone programmers community seems to be thriving. What can you tell us about it, and who were your inspirations for Books.app? What can you suggest to would-be iPhone programmers?
ZBG: All of the hackers who opened up the phone and created a toolchain in less than a month are, of course, huge inspirations. The MobileTerminal folks, stepwhite of iphoneNES, and Erica Sadun all loom large in Books.app’s source code. And I also thank the folks maintaining the Installer.app and the various repositories. As far as the community is concerned, I’m something of a loner, actually; I have gleefully stolen from the best, and encourage people to steal from me, but you don’t often find me on the IRC channel or anything.

My wife was a more direct inspiration for Books.app. She’s been reading eBooks on her Palm for years now. So I wrote it to impress her.

As far as advice to potential programmers, the first step is: Learn Cocoa. If you’ve programmed Mac OS X apps before, you should have no problems.

iW: Did you maybe consider coding programs for the iPhone as a commercial idea, releasing let’s say shareware versions of really requested applications? You certainly have the skills, and the demand is out there. And as for “jailbreak” and other things that stop regular iPhone owners from trying third party, surely a multiplatform installer/script program could be written to remove jailbreak and upload a new program at the same time…
ZBG: The Installer.app folks have already done it! I thank them profusely! As far as shareware is concerned, well, I think shareware sucks. Donationware is great, and heck, I’ll accept PayPal from anyone who wants to send me some dough. But Books.app is open source, not just because I stole ideas and code from open-source applications, but because I strongly believe in the free software philosophy.

Also, when you come right down to it, I’m a hobbyist. If people _bought_ something from me, it’d stop being a hobby and become a job.

iW: Releasing Books.app brought you certain popularity among the iPhone community, so we refuse to believe that this will be your last project. So what’s the next iPhone application that we could expect to see from Zachary Brewster-Geisz?
ZBG: Honestly, I haven’t a clue! Books.app filled a need that I had: to read eBooks when I didn’t have Wi-Fi or EDGE. I’m pretty self-directed, so I’ll have to wait and see what my next need is.

iW: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions and we hope to talk with you again soon. Any last words for our readers?
ZBG: Yes, two: “troglodyte” and “honeyfuggle.”

iW: *running to check the dictionary*

Interviewed by: Dennis Sloutsky exclusively for iPhoneWorld.ca.

 

Related posts:

1. Books.app iPhone eBook Reader v0.8
2. Books.app iPhone eBook Reader v0.4.2
3. Books.app iPhone eBook Reader v1.0
4. Interview with the creator of iPhone NES.app
5. Books.app iPhone eBook Reader v0.9

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Filed Under: iPhone Interviews