There are already many useful interactivities built in the iBooks Author, but I find them somewhat simple. My colleague mentioned, that maybe I can use Tumult's Hype to add some widgets into the soup. In the end I bought the programme and have been trying it out a week or so now. And I must say that I like it.
The biggest problem with anything iPad related is naturally Flash. It won't work in iPads, so all the interaction needs to be done some other way. And that would then be HTML5. That's what Hype does: create HTML5 documents with JavaScript that can then be added to homepages or made into widgets. The good part is that the user doesn't need to know much about JS to make simple things work. The better part is that if the user does know JS, they can add the code directly into the document and go far beyond the default settings.
The programme is still very young and many features are not there yet, but for me it's very useful tool to do neat stuff with HTML5 (and to wean myself from Flash) without the trouble of pure coding. (This is not really an advertisement, more like pure joy that I've found a useful programme for myself that I enjoy using.;)
A screenshot of the project I've been working with.
