Techno Babble

The British Library http://www.bl.uk/ in conjunction with Armadillo systems http://www.armadillosystems.com/ have developed a browser based WPF Application that enables you to browse through a collection of their books.

“Turning the Pages” http://www.turningthepages.com/ allows you to browse through the pages of 15 of the most valuable works at the British Library.

and now some marketing blurb

The Turning the Pages™ 2.0 Toolkit is the latest version of the award-winning Turning the Pages™ software. It allows users to cost-effectively build their own online libraries, with no technical know-how and in minutes. It offers a compelling 3-dimensional experience, a range of useful tools and the ability to scale to any number of books.

The toolkit runs as a hosted service – so we host all the files and run the application for you, but visitors to your site still see your web address. This means no set up or maintenance for you, and the guarantee of a robust server infrastructure optimised just for Turning the Pages™.

Turning the Pages™ uses some of the latest Microsoft technologies and therefore requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista. As a next-generation application, it benefits from being run on newer computers. We plan a Macintosh version later in 2007.

Although I had difficulty running the application on some machines, I did manage to get it working on my Laptop (so now, at least, I know my laptop is Vista Premium Ready )

Autodesk was recently showing its 2008 product line to journalists at its “Worlds Media Day”, lots of reports around the web, but here I’m just going to mention 2 items:

Touchwall – a large LCD screen that responds to hand strokes so that, for example, you can zoom in by moving your hands together on the screen, Autodesk may start selling these screens.

BoomCAM – a hand held LCD screen on a counter-weighted articulated arm (Boomcam). It shows what you would see if moving a window around a large room positioning the image around a virtual model.

Autodesk becoming a technological innovator perhaps?

Scheduled to be released in April, you can read all about the forthcoming features available in Autodesk Inventor 2008, in the What’s New document

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/s-new-2008.pdf.