Manual of Style for templates?

Sigh, my experience with computers goes back to the 1980s, when I did contract proofing for Microsoft. Back then, an enormous amount of work went in to releasing software with top-notch documentation. It was one thing Microsoft did right.

Today, not so. We're lucky if the app includes a help file with basic how-tos like iBooks Author. You'd think that Apple, with its tens of thousands of employees, could have designed one of them to write a top-notch book looking at the app from every imaginable angle, a book they could have either given away free on the iBookstore or sold for enough to pay the writers salary and then some.

Unfortunately, almost every developer (Scrivener is a marvelous exception) now releases apps with minimual documentation. They leave the writing of adequate documentation to outsiders. And that's unfortunate. I used to do tech writing. It is very helpful to be at the company and be able to ask programmers, "OK, how does this feature actually work?" It's also a good for quality control. A writer can often point out flaws in the design or implementation that programmers haven't seen.

Yes, I'm rather surprised that Apple didn't do a few things:

1. Including styles for books other than graphic textbooks. It'd be great to have a simple novel template available, one without all the graphics that have to be deleted and sections that just get in the way. I hate the thought of spending several hours to figure out how the templating scheme works just to create something simple like the book I'm working on now.

I suspect that's an illustration of the typical corporate problem: the execs get hot about something and everyone runs about making them happy. In this case, the execs are hot about K-12 education and perhaps the possibility of selling iPads to schools by the boatload.

You see that in the claim during the presentation that an iPad is more durable than a textbook. I felt like suggest that someone from Apple and I go to the roof of a four-story building. He drops off an iPad, and I drop off my college physics textbook into the parking lot belot. Which will still be working? Heck, ask yourself which will still be in service five years from now even if nothing is done?

2. No system for sharing templates other than than downloading one from someone else's website and sticking it in an obscure folder. That's at least partly excusable, since this is the 1.0 version.

3. No other text import formats other than Pages or Word. Markdown support would be especially nice since text lines starting this way:

# Chapter 1

## Section 1

## Section 2

#Chapter 2

Would import in just the right structure within the template even if they were in a single file.

I did confirm something useful. If you have a string of book chapters, each in an individual file and sorted by name in the proper order, dragging into iBooks Author will import all of them in that same order and as separate chapters. Since that book I'm working on has almost 60 short chapters in Scrivener, that's a relief. And Scivener's developer is promising to create some sort of compile for iBooks Author feature that'd export, with one commmand, the individual chapters in individual files in a way that will import correctly into iBooks Author.

Keep in mind that this app is the 1.0 version probably rushed out to meet a Beat Amazon deadline. Use the provide feedback in to app to make suggestions.