Our parting shot before ‘the other arf’ makes us wind down for Christmas. Seasonal promotion, one lucky person can win a $50 iTunes gift token by writing a validated review of Foliobook on the AppStore, the winner will be selected at random from the people who add a review.
Check out this link on our redesigned website for the rules and instructions on how to enter. The competition is open to owners of Foliobook who post a review on iTunes before the end of 2011
Version 2.9 supports iOS5.0.1 and iOS 4.3
iOS 5.0 is not recommended as images may be automatically deleted by iOS in the case of a shortage of storage space on the iPad. A new Backup and Restore capability provides the ability to create complete backups of a portfolio and to copy it to other iPads running Foliobook
Backups are stored in the iTunes Filesharing directory. To copy a portfolio between iPads, copy the backup file from iTunes. This file can then be shared and used by importing it into iTunes on another computer to allow a different iPad to restore the portfolio.
Note that backup files can get very large, and they will be automatically backed up via iCloud. We advise storing these files outside of iTunes in order not to fill up iCloud data usage unnecessarily. To do this, copy the backup file from iTunes and store it somewhere safely on your system. Then delete the backup file from iTunes
Foliobook does some things some competing apps don’t, like allowing unlimited numbers of galleries to be used, and also using a full size image import for zooming, the use of moving backgrounds (video) for the home page and subcategories and so on.
These capabilities while useful use the resources of the iPad quite heavily, and those resources are often thin on the ground, the main one being the available RAM in the iPad. For those who are not familiar with the difference, the RAM (random access memory) is what the iPad uses as a ‘short term memory’ for running programs.
On the iPad 1 the amount of RAM available is 256 Megabytes, and on the iPad 2 this is 512 Megabytes. Theres not much room for programs to play in. In fact Safari can regularly use 60Mb of memory, and Foliobook needs about 16-20 to run smoothly. At best on an iPad1 there is often only 60-100Mb available that apps like Foliobook can use, so its easy to get that filled up if Safari is running at the same time.
Users of the iPad2 should very rarely encounter problems as the iPad 2 comes with twice the available RAM of the iPad1. Luckily, for the iPad user there are things you can do that make Foliobook run better if you see the following symptoms.
1) Foliobook exits a gallery without being ‘told’ to do it.
2) Pictures move more jerkily than usual.
3) Reactions to links, buttons, navigation seems very slow.
4) The app exits by itself (crash).
Before allowing Foliobook to be sold via the app store we run tests of a variety of types which means that crashes are not caused by bugs in our program, crashes are almost always just caused by Foliobook running low on RAM, so this is something the user can help avoid, and we can’t do much about at our end, without removing some of the nice things our app does.
Luckily 9 times out of 10 there is a remedy that only takes a few seconds to use.
Double click on the round button on the iPad. You will then see a bar slide up from the bottom of the screen showing you what apps are running on the iPad in addition to Foliobook.
If you see Mobile Safari running, your problems may be over just by shutting that down as it uses a lot of RAM, in general it needs about twice the space Foliobook needs, but in truth it can’t hurt to shut down apps that you aren’t currently using and which are just hogging RAM when you don’t need them.
To shut down one or more app, touch one of the app icons and hold the finger down until the icons acquire badges and start to wiggle.
Once you see this, just tap the ‘-’ badge on the upper left to close the apps that appear here.
When you are done closing apps, just double click the round button again… and Foliobook will occupy the full screen again. So if you encounter a problem, such as slowness, you can quickly close some background apps without needing to stop and restart Foliobook.
In the past we’ve advised people to power off their iPad and power it on again, thats guaranteed to clean up a few things, but its very disruptive. Closing down background apps is much less time consuming and may be something you can even do in the middle of a presentation.
We would advise closing down unnecessary apps *before* you even start Foliobook and definitely before you give a presentation of your work.
In future we want to add some more capabilities to Foliobook like music playing during a slideshow, each feature we add can mean that Foliobook needs a bit more space to run successfully and with the iPad3 on the horizon, we’ll be needing to handle larger images if the rumours about higher screen resolution are true. Careful management of apps in the background is the quick and easy way to get the best out of our app for users of older iPads.
A couple of our users have encountered a problem in exiting a subcategory. This only happens in the specific case where the subcategory has been assigned menu type ’3′ in the set of types, what we call the ‘free’ menu.
With this menu type, the links/buttons can be panned and moved to any place on the page.
If this menu type is selected in a subcategory, and no galleries or other elements are added to the subcategory, then it becomes impossible to exit the subcategory by pinching.
The solution to this problem is either
a) Add a gallery to the subcategory
b) Change the menu type, either through the toolbar menu, or by selecting a different theme from the theme wizard.
It will then be possible to exit the subcategory normally.
To understand these points further, please view the two subcategory video tutorials starting with this introduction. Following the approach used in the tutorials will avoid any problems.
We’d like to post a warning for users on iOS 4.3 considering upgrading to 5.0 or for users on iOS 5.0 considering upgrading to 5.0.1
We advise holding off on upgrading until we release a new update of Foliobook (2.9) in the next week or two.
This is because there is a rare chance of experiencing data loss in Foliobook with these two upgrades, it has currently affected less than .1% of users, but we don’t want it to affect anyone who can avoid it.
This problem is a side effect of changes we made to accommodate updated data storage requirements made by Apple when iCloud was introduced. Unfortunately meeting this data requirements had an unintended side effect of making it possible for iOS to delete users pictures if an iPad is restored and/or starts to run out of storage space.
For anyone already running on 5.0 or 5.0.1, please ensure that your iPad has plenty of free storage space (5Gb if possible, but as much as you can spare if this isn’t possible) as this will safeguard you against the possibility of your imported images being ‘randomly’ deleted by iOS if runs out of storage space.
The 2.9 version of Foliobook will provide a fix for this and will in addition include backup/restore capability to help improve data security of Foliobook in future.
