Links to Maps from iBooks

A reader asks what happens with the Map links in the Barcelona Beyond Gaudí book now that iOS no longer has the Google Maps app. It's a good question, so I thought I'd answer it here.

In the Barcelona Beyond Gaudí book, I targeted the map request to Google:

<p><a href="#left" id="caption">A spiral decoration on the gates to Sant Pau Hospital. </a><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps/?q=loc:41.411403,2.174297+(Spiral%20Decoration%20on%20Gate)" ><img src="images/map.gif" alt="map button" id="mapbutton" /></a></p>

And it looks like this:



When your reader clicks the Map link in iOS5, iBooks passes them to the Google Maps app. In iOS6, iBooks passes such links to the Google Maps page, in Safari:



And the reader can still click on the Directions or Street View buttons at the bottom. Here is Street View:



Then a quick four finger flick, and the reader can jump back to iBooks.

To send the reader to the Apple maps app instead of the Google Maps page, you just have to target the link to the Apple maps server:

<p><a href="#left" id="caption">A spiral decoration on the gates to Sant Pau Hospital. </a><a href="http://maps.apple.com/maps/?ll=41.411403,2.174297" ><img src="images/map.gif" alt="map button" id="mapbutton" /></a></p>

Then when your reader clicks the Map link, iBooks sends them to the Apple Maps app (without asking if they want to leave the iBooks app, one should note).

Note that the Apple Maps app doesn't mark where the location is on the map:



And there doesn't seem to be a street view, though you can click the page curl in the bottom-right corner to view Satellite view and then zoom in.



You can get more information about creating links to the Apple Maps app in the iOS Developer Library.

Zen* and the Art of the Modular Ebook - #BiB12

I spoke at the amazing Books and Browsers 2012 conference, organized by Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, at the end of last month in San Francisco. They've just made the video of my talk available so I wanted to share it.



In the video, I share the experiences with print publishing, Barcelona, and HTML that led me to where I am today—a bestselling computer book writer, turned publisher and Catalanist!

I should note that my blog is misspelled in the titles. If you're here, you know it's Pigs, Gourds, and Wikis.

And I'm particularly embarrassed that I misspoke about Matthew Tree. He is not "London-based" but rather he is originally from London, but has lived in Barcelona for the past 25 years or so. His book, Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside, has been described as “A must-read to understand Barcelona and Catalonia”.

And La Biblia del Macintosh, Tercera Edición, which was one of the first ever books about the Macintosh to be translated into Spanish actually had 1000 pages, not 500. It sold for 5000 pesetas, which was about $50, a monstrous sum at the time. I think we did an initial print run of about 3000 copies, which we financed by localizing the first ever translation of Adobe Photoshop into Spanish (version 3). We eventually sold all 3000 copies, taking advantage of the social marketing tools of the time: email, newsletters, and expensive advertisements in the Spanish edition of MacUser. I can only imagine where we could have gotten to if we had had Twitter.

They say you get less nervous the more that you speak in public. I'm still waiting!

Gaudí at the Apple Store in Barcelona

There's a bit of a hullabaloo in Barcelona today because of a huge, Gaudí-esque mosaic barrier that appeared overnight in front of the soon-to-be-opened flagship Apple store at the top of Plaça Catalunya. I finally got a chance to go down to see it this morning.

Before I go on, you have to know that Gaudí was a modernist (read: art nouveau) Catalan architect from the beginning of the 20th century, famous for using natural forms in his buildings. One of his most treasured (and most visited) creations, is the Park Güell, which has a gorgeous, undulating, mosaic bench that overlooks the city and the sea.



You should also know that there are mosaic recreations of every cheesy souvenir you can think of, including bulls which are as Spanish as they are non- and even anti-Catalan. In my mind, Apple got to the party late, but I'll give them credit for at least attempting to honor a bit of Barcelona's heritage.

There were reports that it is just cardboard. Not true, I touched it and I can assure you it's real. In fact, as I stood there looking at it, lamenting the shadow of the spotlights on the Apple, I overheard some American guys who were giving it some last-minute touches with a staple gun (into the grout).



I asked them if they had come all the way from the US to build this thing, and the guy told me that in fact, it was the work of The Guild, a design firm in Los Angeles, and that they had built the mosaic mural in LA and had shipped it to Barcelona, and constructed it in a single night, thanks to the efforts of 40 workers.

And then he told me that it was a temporary wall, and that it would disappear—indeed be destroyed and thrown into dumpsters!—in 10 days when the new Apple store opens.

Here are some closeups. The first time I saw pictures, I knew there was something in there. But it was @ganyet who pointed me to this post that explains how the mosaic is made up of "broken" Apple icons.





If anyone's wondering (not any of my regular readers, for sure :), Apple wrote the sign in Catalan, the language that's spoken in Barcelona. It's not a dialect, not a mix of Spanish and French, but rather a Romance language with a 1000 year old history and with more speakers than many other much more well-known languages (like say, Danish).

More pics on Flickr.

Catalonia Press: Ebooks and Synergy in Barcelona

A kind reader asked me yesterday if I was all right, mentioning the fact that I hadn't written since March 5th. Wow, time really does go by fast. Every day I promise to write, both in this blog and in my A Year in Barcelona blog, and then the day flies by. Today, I write first.


What I've been doing is starting a new publishing house. It occurred to me the other day that the last time I lived in Barcelona, I did the same thing: I created a little publishing house called Página Uno, that specialized in Macintosh-related books in Spanish (we also did one title in Catalan). I think it's something about living between two cultures and three languages that makes me want to figure out how to bring the two (three!) together and share information from each place with folks from the other.

I also think it's curious that all of the things that I've studied in my life keep coming together and recombining in a very zen-like way. I started college at the Wharton School of Business, in their Entrepreneurial Management program. It was a very fancy, prestigious place to be, and I hated it. Not the school, but the classes, and the emphasis on money. As a kid I had tried to start businesses, going door to door wherever we lived selling homemade candles, bread, greeting cards, whatever I could think of. I had a paper route and got a job in the local drugstore as soon as I turned 16. But it was never about the money, it was about creating things, and about creating a business.

So, I was one of a tiny handful of students that year who transferred from Wharton to the liberal arts College of the University of Pennsylvania, where I eventually ended up creating my own major called "Spanish Studies". Fascinated with languages, my course load included Spanish, Catalan, and Basque, as well as courses in literature, history, and sociolinguistics. Ah, but what do you do with that?

I spent my first year out of college (1986-7) as a Spanish teacher, in a private day school in Princeton, New Jersey. I loved the explaining and talking about language, but I hated getting up in front of semi-motivated kids who mostly wanted to know what would be on the test. I remember listening in my car on the way to school one day when they announced that the Olympics would be held in Barcelona in 1992. I still remember gushing about it at school to my students later that day.

In 1987, I decided to move to Barcelona. I was 22 and, just like now, I loved creating things, thinking up business ideas, teaching, and languages. Thanks to a cutting-edge friend, I was already hooked on the Mac.

I found a job the second day after I arrived... in a company that wanted to market their OCR software in the United States and so needed someone to translate the documentation into English. For the next three years, I translated computer programs and the manuals that went with them: stretching and expanding both my languages and my teaching ability. I learned how to go from one language to another, and I observed which manuals made sense and which should have been organized some other way.

All this time, I spoke Catalan almost exclusively; no English and no Spanish. At one point, I even searched out a Spanish conversation partner because there was no one in my circle of friends or work associates that spoke to me in Spanish. Not because they refused, just because it would have been awkward, since we normally spoke in Catalan.

And I remember this deep need to share what I was learning with my friends and family back home. And of course, people here were constantly asking me what America was like. Did we really eat hamburgers all the time? Live in wooden houses? Drive everywhere we went? How *do* you play baseball? It was so interesting to see my country from their eyes. I don't think I ever saw it quite so clearly—even as I knew their vision was limited mostly to what they saw in the movies, and if they were lucky, a visit to the Empire State Building.

In 1990, I started the publishing house, Página Uno, a sort of continuation of the kind of work I did at the first job, but now as an independent company. And again, it combined everything I loved: language, teaching, and computers. We published 14 books in three years, The Macintosh Bible being the first. I carefully chose the books we would publish, focusing on those with an independent voice that advocated for the reader. Thinking back on it, I can see that part of my goal was to share part of my country with people here. I wanted my Catalan and Spanish friends to be able to get the same fresh, opinionated information that I was privy to.

Fast forward to the present (or else I'll lose the few readers who have made it to this point). My husband and I decided to come live in Barcelona this year mostly so our kids could really get a feel for this culture that they also belong to. We have been here since August and will stay until just after the school year ends in July. And my original plan was just to keep doing what I've been doing for the last 17 years: write computer books in simple but not simplistic language.

But after a few months, I found myself pulled back again to the same goal: to serve as a bridge between two cultures that I love, and that somehow both seem to be mine.

It's frustrating, because few outside of this place have ever heard of Catalonia. Barcelona, perhaps, now that it has climbed the rankings of “most popular tourist site”, or whatever. But Catalonia is so much more than Gaudí and beaches. And as much as I bombard my poor Facebook friends with stories about the independence movement, or the literature, or the popular festivals of sweet onion eating or human castle building, or whatever, it often feels like a lonely pursuit.

Sometime in the fall, I happened upon a website by a guy named Matthew Tree. Matthew was born in London but moved to Barcelona around 25 years ago. He had a whole collection of essays on his site that did just what I've always tried to: explain this place to folks who don't know a thing about it. And his writing is great: he's funny and direct and has a great eye for what's beneath the surface.

So, I wrote him and asked if he'd be interested in me helping him compile an electronic book edition of his essays. And he said yes! (What I didn't know, in all my recently-arrived naiveté, was that Matthew is a renowned author around these parts, and appears regularly in print and in radio, and had his own television show for a while. Every time I tell someone I'm working with him, their eyes get big and they ask me how I did it. The answer is, I just asked.)

Originally, we were only going to do electronic editions, but people began asking about print. So, I started exploring Print on Demand, thanks to a couple of books (and emails!) by Aaron Shepard, which I'll explain in more detail in a separate post. It's so exciting what can be done nowadays. A week ago, I sent the print files for Matthew's book to Lightning Source in Tennessee, and yesterday I got my first proof: an actual book! It's not perfect yet; I'm afraid I made a few beginner's mistakes (too much outside margin!), but I am thrilled at the possibilities.

I've got a few more projects in the works that I can't talk about quite yet, but I can already feel myself getting closer and closer to my goal: being able to share Catalonia with my English-speaking compatriots at home (and throughout the world)—which somehow miraculously turns out to be a combination of all the things I love to do: languages, books, teaching, and computers.

And so, I've created a new publishing house: Catalonia Press. You'll find information there about Matthew's book, “Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside”, other projects that I'll be publishing, as well as news and information about Catalonia that I've found on other sites. I hope you find it worthwhile. Because really, there is so much more to this place than Gaudí and beaches (though I'll admit, I'm a particular fan of both).

One added benefit is that everything I learn in this new venture will help me better explain ebooks (the EPUB version of Matthew's book includes video and is already available in the iBookstore while the Kindle version is available from Amazon) and self-publishing in the real world. (I can't wait to explain everything I've learned about video...)

Update:I've just uploaded sample editions of Matthew's book so you can get an idea of what it's like.

Working at Home

Here's the sort of meme I'd be interested in: what does your workspace look like and how do you make it as efficient as possible? If you decide to join in, please send me a link. I'd love to see where and how you work.

[Cross posted from A Year in Barcelona]

I suppose I should be writing about our road trip through France over the weekend, but instead, as I assembled my office as I do every morning, I thought I might show you my workspace.

You see, here in Barcelona, we have a very small apartment, perhaps about 70 square meters (700 square feet), and I think that includes the hallway and the walls. It's very compact. I don't have a dedicated office space because there simply isn't room for one. Instead, I use the dining room table.

As soon as everyone leaves in the morning, I get rid of all the breakfast crumbs and make sure the table is completely clean. I hate a sticky desk.



Next, I grab the mini Belkin USB hub from the bookshelves, which is already hooked up to my wireless mouse and wired keyboard, and plug it in to the outlet on the floor.



Next, I grab my external monitor from the same bookshelf. I would have liked to have gotten one of those beautiful Apple jobs, but instead, I got a cheap, compact, and light LG (Mine is the M227, very similar to the one linked, but perhaps only available in Europe.) It even doubles as a TV, though I don't use it for that. The monitor goes on the table, and I plug it in as well.



I set my Macbook Pro on the corner of the table with the ports facing the monitor. It's just sleeping, I almost never turn it off. I have to plug it into the wall outlet first, or else the monitor doesn't work. Then I just plug in the monitor cable and the USB hub cable. Voilà, the monitor goes on.



Finally, I grab my fancy mouse pad (read: pad of paper of appropriate size and texture), my wireless mouse, and my stack of papers, from the bookshelf where they live during the evening and set them on the table. I'm ready to go faster than it took to read this article.



In the evening, just before everyone gets home, I reverse the process and put everything in reverse order back onto the bookshelf so they're easier to get the next morning.

I also have a printer and a scanner on the bookshelf, but only put them on my desk when I need them.

What does your workspace look like? How do you make it efficient?

A Proud Internaut

[Cross posted from A Year in Barcelona.]

When we lived in the States and there were considerably less Catalans around with whom to keep up the language, I used to look around on the internet for ways to practice. Several years ago, I found a radio show called L‘Internauta, whose tagline I just love: “a program about technology, but more importantly, about what people do with technology”. I would download the podcasts, and listen to them in my car, incongruously hearing Catalan while seeing America.

But it wasn’t just language practice. The program is directed by a guy named Vicent Partal, who also began and runs one of the most, if not the most, important source of Catalan news online, Vilaweb. He is a great radio host: knowledgeable and self-effacing, warm and personable. Each week he finds really interesting people to talk with on the show: a group beginning a twitter-based book club, a Catalan programmer-cum-entrepreneur who has written award-winning tools for social marketing, a rural group that used the internet as an organizational tool, and many more. And there are also regular guests, who help direct the conversation to the topics of the week, be they new products, viruses, or general technology news. It always seemed like they were talking about just what I needed to know more about, and I learned a lot. OK, and I can't deny I'm intrigued by how Vicent, who is from Valencia,  conjugates verbs!

Those of you who've read my books know that I tend to use a lot of examples from Catalunya. Usually, I just use my own photographs in order to avoid dealing with rights issues, but several years ago, I needed an example of a video on YouTube. I'd never corresponded with Vicent before, but I thought I'd ask him if he wouldn't mind if I used one of Vilaweb's broadcasts. I'm not sure what he thought of this American stranger writing him in Catalan with such an unusual request, but he kindly gave me permission and you can see the results on pages 306-7 of the Sixth Edition of my HTML book.

Over the next few years, as I listened more assiduously to L’Internauta, and read Vicent's editorials in Vilaweb, often about Catalunya's struggle for independence, I would write Vicent emails from time to time. Probably “fan mails” would be more accurate. I was just an admirer, impressed with the technology, his political insight, and his obvious caring about people. Once in a while, I would suggest some collaboration, and even tried translating Vilaweb articles into English for a time.

It's a curious relationship. There are a few people who follow me in this way too, folks who have used my books to start their careers and then write me letters every once in a while, and update me on what they're doing. I think it's part of how the internet works, and I like it. Somehow it connects us all together.

A few weeks ago, they opened a new Apple Store in Barcelona. I used the purchase of Pages (which can now export to EPUB!) as an excuse to go visit. And there among the throngs of devotees, I recognized Vicent Partal. It took me a while to get up the gumption, but I finally went over and introduced myself. He was perfectly friendly, but distracted with the business he had come to do. I still left happy that I had finally met in person someone I really admired.

When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to find an email from Vicent. And when I told him about my latest book on EPUB, he suggested I be a guest on L’Internauta. That was today. At first I was really nervous, but it was so fun. It's going to sound stupid, but I love talking about EPUB. I love that anyone can publish a book, that you don't need a publisher, or expensive software, and I love helping people do it. I'm totally intrigued with how the whole market is shifting and how publishing is changing, and I've spent the last six months following all sorts of interesting people on Twitter to learn more about it. And it was really special to be on my own favorite radio program!

I think I've explained this whole thing because this, for me, is the beauty of the internet: making connections with people who might be far away and might speak other languages, but who have a common interest and are willing to share what they know. This is what that blog post the other day about print versus ebooks was getting at: How long are you willing to bet against people using things into beauty? I bet on beauty winning out.

Obama Effect?

So, I'm in this old taxi in Barcelona and on the radio they're talking football (as they're wont to do) and explaining some old feud between the two big Catalan teams: F.C. Barcelona and F.C. Espanyol... I couldn't quite get it all, but I guess it's been three years since they haven't talked to each other and one of them recently invited the management of the other to a big dinner and the other declined...

So one of the radio people says, maybe they should take the lead from Obama, and instead of going back and forth with the same petty arguments, rise above the fray, overlook their differences, and work on finding a peaceful resolution.

Honestly, I can't remember the last time the US came up in a debate on the radio in which we were looked up to as an example to follow. What a difference!

Mallorca

We've been studying Catalan History and since King Jaume I invaded and conquered Mallorca in 1229, I decided we should go there. I did so with some trepidation since the last time I was there, in 1987, I had gone to the town of Alcúdia (with 10 high school students under my care) thinking that the farther from the big city we were, the more peaceful it would be. Only huge hotels and British pubs greeted me in that town.

So this time, I was pleasantly surprised. After an insanely cheap flight from Barcelona (20 euros! = about $25), we rented an incredibly cheap car (7 euros/day) to an amazingly small town with a single narrow windy street (both from curves and wind) on the northwest coast, called Banyalbufar. Our hotel (which was neither insanely nor incredibly cheap) had a beautiful view of the terraced hillside, full of orange and lemon trees and sheep, all the way down to the coast.



You could hear the sheep before you saw them... they all wore cow bells (sheep bells?) that made a lovely tinkling noise

Facebook, Barcelona, and Old Friends

It feels like forever ago since I got this link and read the article but it turns out it was only a few days. It's been on my mind. Every time we come to Barcelona (ok, and when we're in the US too, but perhaps less, because it feels slightly less intentional) I have to figure out what we're doing here. I mean, mostly I know this. We come to see friends, to surround the kids with cousins and Catalan, but above all, we come to maintain the connection with the people here we love. It's both exciting and exhausting to plan these full weekends of concentrated conversations that usually happen only once a year.

And it makes me wish they were all on Facebook so that I could have a little more of the boring middle time with them.

Candles and History

So, around 1991, my parents and sisters came to visit me for Christmas, and they were still there for Three Kings Day which happens to be my sister's birthday. In Barcelona, the Kings actually arrive on a boat (from the Orient, of course) at the harbor on January 5th and then travel through the city (in an amazing parade) so that their royal couriers can collect the "please, can I have a ..." letters from the children along the way. The Kings' retinue is not limited to fancy mailmen, however. They have loads of servants and courtesans and a huge throne and jugglers and at the very end, there are real trucks full of real coal.

Which is all purely incidental to my story... but it turns out we were all in the center of the city watching the Three Kings Parade and realized that we should get some candles for my

Getting acclimated

We're not quite sure what to do yet, besides sleep at weird times of day. But flights to everywhere are incredible cheap (40 euros round trip to Mallorca!) so we may just decide to make it to that island conquered by Jaume I a thousand years ago after all. I'm off to the library to look up info...

Meanwhile, yesterday we wandered about a bit. While dh went off to play capoeira and soccer, the kids and I went shoe shopping (one pair of ripped snow boots just isn't enough). Unsuccessful, we ducked into a little cafe that I used to love that was recently reviewed by the New York Times, called Viena. It has pretty much turned into a slightly expensive Subway, but it was a welcome respite from the shoes. The

How to cure a ham

We got to Barcelona this morning about noon. Our flight rather left New York about 3 hours late which made it pleasantly easy to fall asleep. I have never felt so rested, never been able to resist going to sleep during the day, but it is 11pm and I'm still pretty wide awake, though fading.

About 5 in the afternoon we went out for a snack and some emergency shopping (croquetas and olive oil to fry them in for dinner, nocilla (the Spanish version of Nutella) and cookies for breakfast, and fresh milk from the neighborhood dairy that had actual cows as recently as 1985. But first stop was the bakery/cafe where we got chocolate croissants and coffee... yum!



Next to the market, mostly for the croquetas, but we were completely sucked in by the gargantuan fresh peas at one