Adobe Thermo Makes Creating Rich Applications Fast and Easy

February 28, 2008 Blog No Comments

Thermo is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application user interfaces. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development. The product will include: Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools. Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”. Define and wire up interactive behavior, such …

Variable Data Printing – Delivering Personalized Marketing Campaigns That Work

February 27, 2008 Blog No Comments

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler It’s no mystery. Most marketing campaigns suck. They use old-school methods with new technologies and don’t deliver the results they should. Most often, campaigns fail to perform as well as they should because most marketing folks don’t have the tools they need to properly segment and deliver personalized marketing messages. Nor do they have the time nor resources to create and manage such campaigns efficiently. That is, until now. To help marketing professionals accomplish their goals, we’re offering a new service called VDP Complete, …

XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries

February 27, 2008 Blog No Comments

Interested in life sciences and healthcare related standards? There’s a lot of them to keep track of. To make your job easier, the folks at XML Cover Pages have created XML in Clinical Research and Healthcare Industries, an online directory of clinical research and healthcare industry standards. While not complete, it’s a great place to start your research. Here you’ll find information about: ASTM Committee E31 on Healthcare Informatics CDC Public Health Information Network (PHIN) CEN/TC 251 Health Informatics CEN ISSS eHealth Standardization Focus Group Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium …

The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives

February 27, 2008 Blog No Comments

In The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives, Jimmy Atkinson of WDDb explores a wide variety of commercial software applications and their open source alternatives. Jimmy’s list is useful but not an apples to apples comparison of products. For instance, he suggests DocBook as an alternative to Adobe FrameMaker. Of course, this is not an accurate comparison as DocBook is not a software tool, it’s a documentation standard. Errors aside, it’s a good read and full of useful links to all sorts …

iPaper: Simply The Best Document Viewing Experience On The Web

February 25, 2008 Blog No Comments

It’s been called “the best document viewing experience on the web” and so far, it is…by a long shot. It’s iPaper, a new web display mechanism from Scribd for documents that was not, despite the “i” prefix, created by Apple. Like a YouTube video, iPaper documents are

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

February 25, 2008 Blog No Comments

Microsoft announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors. Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities. “These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we …

One Site Fits All Doesn’t Fit

February 22, 2008 Blog No Comments

The Web has absolutely improved the world for shopping. With a few minutes effort, you can get almost anything… from almost anywhere. The opportunities are endless. On the flip side, e-commerce companies can now attract customers from almost anywhere at any time. With a solid, usable site, the world is their customer base, right? Maybe. Organizations struggle with globalization-localization issues. Can one site fit all? Can parts of the design be standardized? Which parts need to be localized? Human Factors International shares the results of recent research.

The Best Test: A Child’s View of the $100 Laptop

February 22, 2008 Blog No Comments

What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out. The BBC asks Rufus Cellan-Jones, age nine, for his review. “You make things. You can see tutorials and demos. Then you can make a new project. I’ve made a crazy UFO which you can move.”—Rufus Cellan-Jones

Designing Your Information Architecture for Content Reuse: Five Best Practices

February 22, 2008 Blog 1 Comment

By Amber Swope, Principal Consultant, JustSystems – Reprinted with permission from DM Review The increasing popularity of Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) means that more users within an organization are looking to repurpose and reuse content across the enterprise. To realize the promise of reuse with DITA, you must optimize the mechanisms it supports and understand how to implement it. When considering the implementation of a reuse strategy, consider the following five best practices. Design a map structure for single-source output. DITA enables the user to create multiple output documents …

Absolut Explores Artificial Creativity

February 20, 2008 Blog No Comments

What would happen if machines were creative? Would we end up cutting off our imaginations and becoming creative vegetables? Or could we learn from the creative machines and become more creative? Absolut Machines is an exploration of artificial creativity provided by the folks at Absolut Vodka. By interacting online with either the Choir Machine, located in Stockholm, or the Quartet Machine, located in New York City, you can experience what it would be like if machines where real creative creatures.