My second iPhone App—Jules Verne Masterpieces Collection—is now available at the App Store. You can skip to the end to get your very own free download coupon if you don’t want to read my ramblings

For the past ten years, I have been trying to find a way to read books on a PDA without going blind or crazy—and I have a virtual cemetery of devices, all the way back to a Casio Cassiopeia from 1996, to show that I mean business. I have never quite been able to find either a device that had the capabilities of displaying the correct amount of information, or an application that capable of delivering a good reading experience.

When I finally got my hands on the JesusPhone, therefore, I expected that reading applications would abound, and that the combination of display capabilities and interface would have finally delivered what I wanted.

Alas, I have been much disappointed. Reading applications in the App Store can be roughly divided in two groups: apps that try to make you believe they’re books, and apps that make you wish you could never read a book again. The former take full advantage of the iPhone’s hardware to deliver wall-to-wall eye candy, which to me sounds like a waste of perfectly good brainpower—if I want something that looks like a book and sounds like a book, I will buy a book, which also smells and feels like a book. The latter are simply unusable—if I want to use browser technology to read a book, I’ll use my damn browser, thanks.

All this ranting led me to write the Masterpieces app. I tried to drink my own coolaid and focused on a few features that I thought were imporant:

My goal was to create a reading experience, not duplicate a book. Therefore, my first step was to create an interface that takes full advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities and is designed for the kind of use that iPhones get.

First of all, I figured that most people use iPhones in situations that requires one to frequently put their devices away and shift their attention to other things—think airports, bus stops, trains, etc. In these scenarios you want the app to not only keep a bookmark for you, but also automatically take you back to the last page of the last book you were reading when you launch it. Taking the user back to the list of books is a bit like going to bed at night with your book on the nightstand only to wake up and discover that someone has moved it back to the bookshelf during the night—it gets annoying pretty fast.

Additionally, I wanted the interface to be as snappy as possible. Again, if you have to continuously start and close the app, you want to spend your time reading and not waiting. Everything in Masterpieces is designed to keep the fluff to a minimum and get you right into reading the next page: there are no gorgeous animations to watch, no sounds to play, no pretty graphics to load. I was aiming for an interface that is elegant, but not intrusive.

I’m going out on a limb, here, but I’m guessing that the fact that a person may like, say, Jules Verne doesn’t necessarily mean that he or she also likes Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Call me crazy, but collections of random books are silly in an electronic medium, where you should be able to have better choice.

That’s why I designed Masterpieces to be a collection of collections—Jules Verne is only the first one because I happen to really love his books, and I wanted to challenge myself to use the application before unleashing it on others. I have more collections in the works.

Typography is very difficult to get right under the best of circumstances, and a 3.5″ screen doesn’t make things easier. Here apps usually go on two tangents: they either use the built-in fonts, which have very poor typography compared, say, to regular OS X rendering (no ligatures, no antialiasing, and so forth), or go for super-antialiased traditional type, which looks great on paper, but not so great on the screen.

Coming up with a proper rendering engine for the type was, by far, the single most difficult and time-consuming part of writing Masterpieces. I literally went through dozens of font combinations and rendering techniques—again, looking for the best possible rendering results.

I ended up settling on a slab serif font rendered with minimum antialiasing. This is interesting, because slab serif fonts are normally used for children’s books due to them being nicely rounded and easy to read, but shunned for adult literature because they look too “simple.” To me, their relative lack of sharp corners and tight angles is perfect for readability on a handheld device.

Finally, I went crazy trying to find the right amount of contrast between type and background. Too much, and your eyes get tired from the apparent brightness of the display; too little, and you get tired because you have to squint too much to tell the type apart.

As a litmus test, I went for what I’d consider a “comfortable” reading posture: arms length without glasses (something that I, for example, can’t do with a regular paperback). I figured most people would likely read either in bed or on the seat of some sort of vehicle, and having to keep your hand up too close to your eyes would tire your arm.

The most difficult decision was—how many books? Originally, I wanted to simply write a book reader app, and let people download books from the Net. I decided against this because, in my opinion, it detracts from the experience of buying a book on the go and being able to read it right away.

As for the right number of books, I made the decision that I’d try to fit as many relevant books as I could while keeping the overall app size to below 10MiB. The reason for this is that you have to be on a WiFi connection in order to download an app that is larger than that size, and that won’t work too well if you’re trying to buy a Masterpieces collection on the go.

With a new app release come some more of those juicy coupons that let you download it for free, so I’m giving some of them away. I only have a handful, and they usually go fast, so drop me a message on Twitter if you want one. Just remember:

Since using these coupons is not all that obvious, here are some steps to help you out: