Saturday, June 14, 2003

Enhanced PDF

First time users of Adobe Acrobat don’t think of it as a ‘multimedia authoring’ tool, because, open it up and nothing appears! No blank page on which draw or create is presented. No tool bar with objects to be dragged onto the screen is available.

To use Acrobat, a PDF needs to be created in some other application first. Could be Microsoft Word or Adobe Illustrator, or, my preference, InDesign.

Once we have the PDF, what can we do beyond basic ‘page turning’?

Acrobat can easily deliver multiple page PDF documents with its built-in forward, backwards, and return icons. The PDF format, however, can be enhanced to include much more:

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Thursday, May 08, 2003

Embryonic eBooks

embryonic because the eBook still feels a bit ‘under development’.
These days new words are being added to the dictionary under the letter ‘e’. It’s easy; just add e - eInk, ePaper, eLife, eworld, eMedia - etc. Not to be outdone the letter ’i‘ is also in for new family members: iBook, iPhoto, iLink.  Note the use of the second letter capital - another addition to written English (or should it be eEnglish?).

The eBook has it’s own semantic problems because you can’t be sure whether someone is using the term in the context of a device or the actual content: so - ‘I read War and Peace on my eBook’ means that they used an ebook device (see below). But, ‘I don’t bother with paper books anymore; I just read eBooks’. In this context, the eBook is a piece of fiction or non-fiction.

But what is the difference between a piece of interactive media like a CD-ROM and an eBook?

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Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Idea Drawing

Ways to help think through ideas and compelling ways to communicate them.  Being a visual person myself, I have always doodled on paper when I am trying to figure an idea out. Projects like web site design or CDROM interfaces do not just result in visual designs but complex arrangements of links between different data.  Developing concepts for these types of ‘new media’ projects will inevitably include representing the designs (both style and structure) visually.  To help us design for the computer as medium there are some good techniques for building visual representations, and some very powerful software tools are available.

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Friday, January 17, 2003

Electronic Publishing

A talk to a delegation of Chinese publishing executives introducing the broad range of activities and issues around the idea of the computer as publishing medium.

A notice about this visit can be found here

Electronic Publishing can mean many things to many different people. It can include ebooks, web sites, desktop publishing, computer games, interactive television,talking books and new technologies such as g3 phones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants).

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