I Really Like the Layout

When we first switched publishers to Apress for the iPhone book, I was honestly a little concerned. Apress didn't have a presence in the Mac / iPhone world other than one user-oriented iPhone book, and their existing styles really didn't work, in a lot of ways, with the Mac conventions for things like menus and key shortcuts. Everything about their styles and layout seemed geared to Windows and Linux alpha geeks, and I was concerned that they just wouldn't grok that there are differences between what we needed, writing a beginner level-book for an audience of Mac users, and the needs of their existing authors.

I've now seen about half of the book in its final form and, frankly, I'm really impressed. The Apress folks did an awesome job with modifying their layout for us to accommodate the Mac and iPhone stuff we had that didn't fit in their existing styles. I think the book looks great and I couldn't be happier with the job the production folks at Apress have done accommodating the sometimes picky demands Dave and I have laid on them.

This same layout will be used for several other Mac books that Apress is planning to publish, including Lean C on the Macintosh, by Dave Mark (my co-author), Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster (an excellent new version that I've had the pleasure of tech reviewing), as well as two yet untitled books, one on Cocoa and one on Xcode.