In this tutorial, we will build our first Bookry widget. The Sketchpad widget is a drawing/painting widget for iBooks Author^R and very popular for children's books and early learners.

In the last tutorial, we created our “My Test Book” on the My Bookshelf in our Bookry.com account and added the Sketchpad widget to our book.

Let’s click on the Sketchpad icon to go to the Sketchpad settings page.

At the top of the page, we can give the widget a unique name. Because I am going to use a sketch of pumpkins, let’s name this widget “Pumpkins”.

Static Settings

Moving downward, our first setting is the Orientation and Size. Bookry recommends that we use the same orientation as our iBooks Author book. We also have the option for Freeform.

Because we are using the free version of Bookry, we can skip over the Branding and Logo setting.

The next setting is for a Cover or Startup Image. The Cover image will be reduced to a thumbnail on the page of your book. When the reader clicks the thumbnail, the widget will open full-page. Bookry suggests that this image be 1024 x 768 pixels. I decided to use a screenshot of my widget as the thumbnail.

The Startup Image is what the user will see as the widget is loading after the thumbnail is clicked. By default, Bookry will use the Cover image for this purpose. But you do have the option to upload a different image. Again the suggested size is 1024 x 768 pixels.

1. To upload your Cover and Startup Image, click the Select image button on the widget settings page. From the upload window, choose your image and click Done.
   
   Now we will work on the image that will be inside the sketch area. We have two options. One option is to use a background image and the reader can color over the top of the background image. In the example, we will use the second option, which is to use a foreground image. This image is usually a line drawing. The reader colors “under” the image, which allows the line drawing to remain visible. If you don’t have an image, you can choose from the pre-made images.
   
   
2. To upload a Foreground or Background image, click the Select Image button on the widget settings page. From the upload window, select your image and click Done.
   
   The last setting is the Color Palette. You have the option to use the default color palette or create your own 13-color palette.
   
   
3. To set a color in the Color Palette, click on the color box to open the Color window and choose a color. You can also type the color code for your custom color into the text box.
   
   

Now we can click the Save button AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE and click the Download button. The widget will be downloaded as a zip file. Unzip the file to get the pumpkin.wdgt file. Drag this file on to a page of your book in iBooks Author.

When we return to the settings page for our widgets book (My Test Book), you will see that the default name for our Sketchpad widget has been changed from "Sketchpad" to "Pumpkins".

Live Settings

At the bottom of the page are the Live Settings. These settings are automatically updated to both new and published books containing this widget. For this widget, we can update the widget title, the background color and the sharing options.