PubCoder - Plus exclusive Reviews

But I asked for a refund. In my case, I wanted to make an example of a game application (Million Dollar Money Drop like). I managed to use some of the elements in the template example, but alas, this game seems too complicated to set up with PubCoder. Unfortunately, I think you need to have a good grasp of coding to take full advantage of this platform. Nevertheless, I imagine that creating an animated digital book is far less complex.

First know that my 3 taco rating might mean that people (like me) do not see this as an easy tool to use. 5 Tacos (to me) means that it is EVERYTHING you expect it to be based on the advertisements and statements made on behalf of the product. So here is why it EARNED 3 tacos.
+1. It is a tool that allows you access to publishing "stories."
+2. There is a possibility that all features listed is able to be accessed and utilized to work as expected.
+3. The documents available shows that there may be an ease for the development of a short story without much need for ALL tools.
Why not 4 tacos?
-4. *Nowhere did it say that it would be difficult to publish in EPUB. They offer a reader to download to read your "stories" organically. :(
-5. **Some, if basic, knowledge of CODE is required. The whole idea is that you don't need to know code to make perfectly awesome--audiobooks, interactive text, etc. :(

*I expected that I could upload my story to EPUB easily. (I can not.) In fact, since I could not create what I had envisioned with this tool, I used one of their "samples". It was an interactive children's book (! I was drooling at the possibility of making my children's book interactive...yeah!). I would consider it "well done." However, when I went to publish it, I found out that I didn't have the right macbook (I would have to upgrade to 13 to utilize the software that would require its facilitation). Otherwise I would have to publish everything in their FREE Pub READER!!! NOOOO! I do not want to have to have another reader app--Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. too many out there already!

**This is a perfectly great tool if you don't mind spending a good amount of time getting onboarded. Their several videos (offered in English and Italian at this time) only make clear the very basic usage, which most of us could just use a website and other tools sold here on AppSumo for which are much less labor intensive.

To give them a 5 Taco rating, they would have to make clear these two things. THEN, and only then, are they ABSOLUTELY 100% right on!

KNOW: I usually only write when I am very happy, asked to with some free offering. If I'm not very pleased, I just get a refund. However, since I was OVER THE MOON with the thought I could use this as stated above, I just felt others like me could save time if they choose to read this review. It would have saved me time (if not money since I will be receiving a full refund upon clicking "submit review." :(

I have only had this tool for a little while and have only dug into about 25% of it. For the range of things you can do with this tool as a digital content creator or marketer you should be ashamed of yourself if you don't give this tool a test drive for this price. If you give it some patience and drive in the slow lane pretty soon you will see how much power and potenial this tool really has. I created a test book for an ipad in less than 30 mins. Small Demo here if you want to check it out.

https://youtu.be/tgZmk-B6jik

I mixed it with another AI iIlustrator tool mixed in a little Canva and I was off to the races. This predict that this will be my highest grossing revenue tool I have purchased from Appsumo. I have this on my project board to create something special by the end of the year. Cheers to the founders of this very mature tool. The only thing that I wish it had was more tuturioals. If they had more of those they would have 3x the sales. That is the only con I have with this tool at the moment.

I spent a long time getting to know what PubCoder can do before buying, and a fair amount of time testing it after I bought. My conclusion: it's not perfect, but it is very powerful and an extremely good value IF you'll use it.

If you're just browsing AppSumo looking for shiny new toys, then you might want to move along. But if you are actually wiling to do some work to create electronic books, then this is an extremely comprehensive and well-thought-out tool. There is room for improvement, but that's par for the course with AppSumo. This is not in early stages, but it has room to grow, and (IF you're someone who will use it, THEN) you'd be crazy to pass up the opportunity to get a lifetime deal for a fix (and relatively small) cost.

That's the positive high-level overview. Now for the negative things I've found so far.

- While the app is in general very responsive and never slow for normal interactions, there are some processes that take a long time. Basically anything involving a progress bar takes a lot longer than I would expect. I'm willing to live with that, since I don't know everything that they have to do during those processes. I'll just give them the benefit of the doubt that there's a reason it takes so long.
- The Quiz widget is extraordinarily simplistic. As far as I can see it only supports multiple choice questions.
- It seems to me that there are other sorts of widgets that would make sense to add.
- I've found a number of mistakes in the English localization.

And here are some things that are unclear to me still
- I'd like to be able to add my own widgets, but I don't see a way
- it appears (based on some of the snippets) that jQuery is included by default. Could I also include something like React? Could I remove jQuery? I would like to be able to add my own React components and have them appear in the Widgets or Controllers section. (Or better yet, have a Components section for them.)

Ultimately none of the problems above are a big deal to me. The positive aspects of PubCoder overwhelmingly make up for any negative aspects I've found.

Think of it this way: if you set out on a project to publish an electronic book, how much time would something like PubCoder save you? Unless you know of a similar product that is better, I can assure you that this will save you countless hours. It could easily be hundreds or thousands of hours, depending on the size and scope of your project. Even if it saved you a dozen hours on a small project, you wouldn't get all the capabilities this gives you with very little effort. You wouldn't be able to easily publish to several different formats, including iOS and Android apps with all the features built in.

IF you'll use it, then just buy it!

I would like to say a huge thank you to the team behind this project. This is awesome software, the whole idea and realization and support.

From the Q&A section where I read very carefully I see that these guys know what they are doing very well.

Highly recommend this deal. Hidden gem💎

The app is quite useful, but the ending result at least for html exports is too many files and unoptimized. After exporting the files I've minified all the files and compressed the images reducing their size, and deleting many useless files, but even like this is quite slow.

This is an example of a Story I made: https://english.anidd.space/Story/TheFox/

Would be nice to have a cleaner code and the option to optimize the files automatically for the exports in html.

An option for displaying a button in the presentations to change to fullscreen would be nice, so it won't be messy when using a phone browser.

I don't know what else to write about this. It's pretty awesome. We only refunded because we don't really have a use-case for it. Otherwise, any ePub or native/web app builders would love this. Really had a nice time testing it out.

This was hard to get to, to put on my computer. My firewall actually tried to block me for an unsafe website. Once I got in, there are no directions on what to do so I ended up choosing trial and going from there with the intention of putting in the serial number after it ran out. There needs to be a little more support in the beginning and some kind of guided support once you start using the platform. The process is not user friendly. I see a lot of potential just from the video App Sumo put together though, I wish you the best.

It's a desktop tool similarly to Affinity. What I like the most is the sidebar. You can actually see all your details, CSS etc. This is so handy for designers. It's very easy to use. It took me only 30 min to get familiar with it..... The only limitation to me is rendering. Takes a bit longer than I thought but other than that very happy with....I'm passing it to our designers and see how we go. CSS feature is really damn good so you can customize your file the way you normally do if you are a designer....Quick and fast...

This is pretty easy to use if you have a clear idea of what you want to do and something similar can be found in the example projects. It seems like documentation might be a little bit lacking. It sounds like support is good and I have not had to reach out to anyone yet. It took about 1-2 hours of playing around with it to understand some of the basics, it can do so much that it might no seem intutive at first.

The pros:
This software offers so much!
The customer service team is responsive.
The software loaded fine on my computer (MacBook Pro) - many said in questions that it was having difficulty or crashed.

The cons:
It is not user friendly.
It is not easy to navigate.
There are no video tutorials-everything is in html format so it is difficult to wade through the information to try to find out what you are looking for.
The customer service responds, but sometimes they do not understand what you are asking (I wanted a turn the page feature, they said they did not have it) I looked further and found it but could not figure out how to get it on my book, I was told, oh, yes that will work. Still no direction how to use it or put it in the book.

I could not even figure out something as basic as previewing the book. I want to see if my layout is good before I try to "add" things to it.

I finally saw the audio/highlight text. This is not word for word, which would be helpful, it is for an entire sentence (according to the example).

So-this software has the potential to be everything an author would LOVE. However, the people at pubcoder released too early. Their platform just isn't ready yet, in my opinion.

Let us be honest here, this app isn't for everybody.
However, for those who need it to author content that is interactive and engaging, it is among the best.
So who is it for?
Here is a list of those who MUST get it without a thought or a pause:
1. Teachers - No matter what you teach, whom or where you teach
2. Coaches - Make yourself understood, with text, rich media, animations, etc
3. Explainers - Same as coaches - Want to explain stuff that your audience will get easily? Grab this.
4. Publicity & Marketers - Repetitive, but if you want to explain anything, get this.
5. Game creators - Want something to create simple games on?
6. Authors - of books or anything - bring your material to life with interactivity.
7. Brand Marketers - Need to drive up engagement with your products? Use this tool to build interactive quizzes, etc.
8. Documentation & Demo Makers - Create step by step explainer videos or walkthroughs with feedback
9. Artists & Creatives - Use pubcoder to add buttons and interactions with your artwork, connect with your fans and consumers
10. Publishers and Agencies - Offer services around transforming traditional media like books, posters, etc to interactive, rich media. Become a new age publishing house.

Hope this will excite you and give you ideas. I am super thrilled by this product. One of the reasons is that this is a MATURE, well-designed tool. In the age of Adobe subscriptions, this LTD is what you need.

This is one of my best purchases on Appsumo (I am an educator, in love with anything Edtech & content creation)

I've used PubCoder before coming to AppSumo, and it is a truly awesome authoring tool. It offers an easy way to create interactive ebooks, PubCoder handles all the technicalities behind the scenes, letting you focus on creativity.
There are a lot of publishing options available to choose from and with the HTML5 export you can also distribute online.
Thanks PubCoder and the team!

Steps to reproduce:

Installed PubCoder
Created a blank project
Added a button
Set the button to open a URL
Clicked Preview
CRASH
Uninstalled
Refund requested

Pubcoder has been in the market is quite a few years no and I am so glad to get an opportunity to buy a lifetime plan at such a price. Pubcoder has so much going on and fits for everyone....beginner to expert. You are only limited by your imagination of what can be achieved with this software. The customizations are endless and so are the possibilities. Do you have old pdf documents you wish to breath new life, look no further....Pubcoder will transform it into an interactive document and breathe new life into your boring Pdfs. And its full blown desktop software. All in all a wonderful product and if you do any type of writing, get it. Best wishes to the team.

I installed this application on my windows PC, I was a little surprised to see my antivirus flag a malicious file after the installation mediainfo.exe and later pubcode web server.exe . I uninstalled the app after that. I wanted to like the software and saw great potential but not like this.

Wow. Within 5 minutes of installing it I had made a simple interactive presentation, buttons and all. And I'm previewing it on my phone, all done just by playing around and following the on screen help tips. This is something I have struggled for hours trying do with Adobe Animate.

I can't imagine what I will make once I actually read the instructions.

This is clearly a very powerful, multi purpose app made with the user in mind. I'm so glad I found this.

I see most reviewers seem to be making epubs, but I bought it to make interactive presentations for my website visitors and to add interactive lessons for my online courses. I will also use it to make interactive visualisations for my web articles.
Seeing how easy it is to use, I expect I will find a lot more uses for it. A+++

If you’re a self-published author who works with fixed layout ebooks and is wide, this is the best tool there is.

Pubcoder is like Indesign for epubs. In the past, I had to hand code epubs. I tried exporting from Indesign and also tried Apple’s Pages. But they all involved clean up and hand coding the media overlays. A real pain.

I was so happy to see this Appsumo deal because my trial had just expired. During the trial, I was able to turn eleven of my children’s picture books I had on Amazon into epubs for Apple, Google play, Kobo and for direct sales.

Direct sale is hard with fixed layout ebooks because the industry’s tool like bookfunnel doesn’t work well with fixed layouts (Readers basically get a PDF… Why?). For readers on iOS devices, epub works great because it can open on Apple’s Book app, but for Android user it’s all over the place, and some epub readers have issues with media overlays. With Pubcoder I can also offer readers the xpub format that will work with the free PubReader app.

I really like that I can work from one master file and create renditions for different stores or even translations. This would make translations easy and even doable for me. Updating back matter or fixing typos is easier since I fix it on the master file and can export all the different formats. Can even export only certain pages for samples. Time saver!

The read aloud wizard is great, but too hard to use at the word level. I wish there was a way to slow down audio? Or a way to adjust the smil timing manually within pubcoder? Please?

Wow. I have barely scratched the surface of what this can do, and already impressed. The desktop application seems quality (still need to learn the ropes), the demos are amazing (though tricky to view initially) and the tutorials (which I plan on going through) seem thorough. I have been on Appsumo for a fair bit of time now, and can judge a great Saas when I see one. Just watching the demos made me inspired to become the next interactive kids book author. Great stuff!

All I can say is that I'm extremely GRATEFUL for your product being here.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you.

Thank you for such top quality piece of software capable of infinite possibilities! You are giving creators the possibility to go to the moon! Why refuse? I'm IN 5 TACOS.

Che Dio o chi per essi vi benedica!

5 TACOS with ketchup