As some of you may know Canonical has a competition starting tomorrow to develop from scratch a new application for Ubuntu Linux, first prize is a System 76 laptop and a phone, second prize is more or less the same but with a slightly lower spec laptop and third prize is a phone, however all entries get a free Ubuntu t-shirt.
So my friend is on a publishing course and has to work a lot with the epub file format and wanted a much easier to use bit of software, so one time in a pub a promised to write it for him, and this has given me the excuse I need to really sit down and have a bit of a hack-a-thon.
In the interest of fairness I informed him about the competition and since I have just bought a brand new laptop and got it just so I decided to let him have the laptop should we actually win.
Now you can infer from the fact I mention my friend asked me to write it that he is not a programmer, however, I will be allowing him as much creative control over the user interface as possible (on account of him being the primary user/tester of the application at this time) and since he knows the format of the epub files much better than I do it shall be a collaboration.
Also, I did I mention the free t-shirt just for entering? Cos I would do it for the t-shirt alone.
Anyway this application which is called LiberEdit(from the Latin "Liber" meaning book and "Edito" meaning publish, so I am told), will be to import, edit and export epub books. It will do this graphically and not having to break open the epub files manually, everything from changing the author information to the actual chapter content should be handled inside the application. I have first draft screen shots, but once they have been approved I shall publish them.
All the best to anyone else taking part, enjoy yourselves.
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