A cross-platform e-book framework for Haxe

UPDATE: The Glory framework is launched and can be found here!

About a year ago my wife gave me Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsensewhich has about a hundred limericks accompanied by strange cartoons. I found it amusing, but only a small percentage of the poems were actually funny. Lear is a talented writer but I couldn’t help but think I could do better in the limerick genre.

So I started writing limericks of my own, using Lear’s work as a benchmark. I’m up to over 75 of them. I intend to illustrate them and I hope I have the time to make them interactive. Because I want to publish to as many application stores as possible, I intend to program the book using haXe and NME. My other idea is to make the framework open source so as to aid the haXe community, the self-publishing community, and also to score a free copy of FDT Max!

So far, my desired list of features for the application is as follows:

  • XML configuration
  • Forward/back buttons
  • Title screen
  • Background music
  • Preference pane
  • Narrated or text-only mode
  • Coloured or tap-to-colour mode
  • Animated objects using spritesheets or swf assets
  • Rating link for specific platform

So what do you think, authors and developers? What else does such a project need?