iBook

The iBook is far simpler for me to design. It is like using a mixture of keynote and pages. These are both programs I have used extensively. It does however, suffer from the Apple mentality of trying to hold your hand through everything. Something I despise. Motion is the same, it is a somewhat functional compositing program that can be used to create some very interesting and sophisticated effects. But the program tries to do everything for you with it's presets and shows you "how it thinks it should be done" really limiting the creativity you can bring to the table. It severely stunts my ability to explore design principles and frustrates me. There is nowhere near the amount of control and precision that Adobe After Effects allows and for me is completely redundant. 

I feel that iBooks Author suffers the same flaw. It is functional but that is it. The UI and presentation are all lovely and clean and there are some interesting and useful features but all in all there are some major flaws and seemingly ridiculous limitations within the program and some of the options for editing existing assets you bring in are severely lacking.

Anyway, that's that out of the way. My point is, the iBook is far simpler to design due to the 'drag and drop' nature of the program and so there aren't many challenges at all really with designing. A lot of the content is recycled from the website and most of the designing is done with sliders and hard controls through the inspector. I will go through the differences from the site however, and how I tried to get the most out of the interactive potential at hand!