We’re really happy to announce some major changes to make Ibis Reader even better for users, including full support for all body fonts on the iPad and iPhone (including the new fonts just added today to iOS4). We also made some improvements to UI reliability and now make better use of the iPad’s larger screen.
- Readers can now select any of the on-board fonts (omitting some unsuitable decorative fonts for clarity).
- Turning pages uses a more reliable method. It’s now much harder to accidentally switch pages by brushing the screen.
- All visual effects now use CSS3. On iPhones and iPads these will appear to be much smoother than before.
- Many menus are on the iPad are now drop-downs, providing a better overall view of the application.
Details follow, click on screenshots to enlarge:
Drop-down menus in iPad
To take better advantage of the larger screen we’ve made some options behave more like native iPad menus rather than the full-screen overlays on the mobile phones. (We do this purely with CSS, including the CSS3 effects for drop-shadows and the like.)
Font customization
On the iPad, we’ve converted the font menu to a drop-down. We’ve also included full support for all the on-board “body” fonts. The iPhone font list includes the new fonts in iOS4; if you still have 3.x, you’ll see them as well but they’ll have no effect.
Until iOS4 supports embedded fonts in a non-buggy way, we’re not able to support embedded fonts either, and at this time user customizations will always override book fonts that are supported on these platforms.
A note about Android: We don’t mean to neglect our Android friends, but we haven’t yet done the necessary research to understand which fonts are on which device/platform. We’d love some help from Android users on font selection; for now Android users will get the same serif/sans-serif selection as in earlier Ibis releases.
How to get the upgrade
As always, updates are automatic! HTML5’s update mechanism does mean that you may need to open and close Ibis Reader at least once to see the new changes.