What’s on at IT Enquirer
By: Erik Vlietinck
March 26, 2008
0 comments
It’s time to give you an oversight of what is available on the site, and what will be published over the next few weeks. First of all, if we learned one thing from the cross-media publishing report, it must be that information is becoming a commodity. Business intelligence or information that will help people and businesses to do a job faster or better, is going to become mainstream. Another conclusion from the report was that trade magazines will probably survive on having “industry libraries” in place.
In one word: if your information is only going to be “interesting” but not “helpful” as well, you might as well give up your efforts. On IT Enquirer we’re doing our best to be helpful as well as interesting. Sometimes we fail; we only hope it’s not too often.
IT Enquirer Awards of Excellence 2007
By: Erik Vlietinck
December 19, 2007
0 comments
In 2007, we were once again treated to a large number of new applications and hardware that allows us to perform our creative tasks with more pleasure, and above all: easier and faster. We composed the list of Award-winning products based on our reviews and how the market reacted to them. Sit back, and enjoy IT Enquirer Awards 2007.
Spotlights on, please! And don’t forget to chill the champagne. This year, we are awarding products in over a dozen categories.
Sandvox Still Outperforms iWeb
By: Erik Vlietinck
December 12, 2007
2 comments
Sandvox 1.2.5 has two competitors: iWeb and RapidWeaver. Dreamweaver isn’t really competition, as it’s more aimed at professionals who don’t mind playing with HTML and Javascript code. And Coda is in a league of its own: it’s a coders’ delight, but you won’t find pre-defined design templates in Coda. You will learn how to code properly, though, given that Coda comes with books built-in. However, Coda is for people who like to keep full control over the look-and-feel of their web site and the way their pages will interact with visitors.
Sandvox is for people who like to rapidly move on with design --and who care more about adapting some pre-existing templates than to come up with something totally original. That doesn’t mean Sandvox is not powerful. In fact, after briefly having gone through the program again 3 years after my first review, I can only say the application has become so much better, I would be tempted to recommend it as a quick prototyping application, even to seasoned web designers. Especially the “Pro” version seems to be worth its money. It has the capability to inject code and to add your own HTML snippets.
New Wolfram Service Opens Up Access to Interactive Mathematica Technology
With the release of Mathematica 6, Wolfram Research reinvented the way we think about technical computing, for the first time making it possible to create sophisticated custom applications with just a few short lines of code.
Now those revolutionary advances are being extended to interactive publishing, with a new web service that makes it possible to deploy dynamic Mathematica documents that run freely on any compatible computer.
Quark Interactive Designer: Does it Make Sense?
Quark delivers Quark Interactive Designer as an add-on for QuarkXPress 7. Quark Interactive Designer was reviewed by IT Enquirer earlier. We then found Quark Interactive Designer to be a valuable addition if you want to make QuarkXPress 7 a complete vertical and horizontal publishing design solution. But due to its simplicity and ease-of-use, and because it is first and foremost aimed at layout designers who don’t want to code in Flash and Dreamweaver, it is also fairly limited in what it can do.
So, I wondered if it makes sense to designers to create Flash presentations, image sequences, or buttons using QuarkXPress 7. I can almost dream that it wouldn’t to German designers. German people in general --if one may generalise at all-- like to have things orderly, and not all running through each other. Quark Interactive Designer makes QuarkXPress 7 behave like something totally different than a layout application. But are such clichés true? A list of German web sites created with Quark Interactive Designer proved me wrong.
Designing For The Web: Who Needs Icons Anyway?
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 29, 2007
0 comments
A RSS icon these days isn’t simply “RSS” inside a coloured rectangle, but an icon made up of something that resembles a dot with two curves at the right side. Who makes up these things? And why should we use them?
We all know that design is “the process of communicating visually using text and/or images to present information, or promote a message” (Wikipedia). The way the information is presented improves your understanding of the information --or not. In the last months, it appears a consensus is growing an icon must be used to represent technologies or services such as RSS and social bookmarking links, rather than text --and preferably one that says nothing about the service itself.
Web Design Just Got A Lot More Powerful
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 25, 2007
0 comments
Yesterday MacRabbit released its newest version of CSSEdit, the CSS editor par excellence. And Panic released Coda, an integrated environment for web design and web development. Did I hear someone mention Dreamweaver? Nobody? Well, let me just say that I am incredibly impressed by both these applications. CSSEdit 2.5 has replaced StyleMaster completely in my workflow, and Coda looks very promising --I hope the developer will enable me to put it to the test thoroughly.
Freeway 4 Pro BUndle With iView MediaPro
By: Erik Vlietinck
March 20, 2007
0 comments
Softpress today announces a special offer that combines Softpress Freeway 4 Pro with iView MediaPro 3 to offer Mac-based creative professionals everything they need to create stunning web sites and efficiently manage entire collections of their digital assets.
The Semantic Web Here & Now
By: Erik Vlietinck
April 06, 2006
0 comments
Adobe saw the rise of interest in the semantic web and promptly started investing heavily in a metadata initiative. It elevated Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) to the status of core Adobe technology, along with Adobe PDF and Postscript. The Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. With XMP, desktop applications and back-end publishing systems gain a common method for capturing, sharing, and leveraging this valuable metadata opening the door for more efficient job processing, workflow automation, and rights management, among many other possibilities. Currently, Adobe is allowing users to preview version 4 of its Adobe XMP Toolkit.
But there’s more: a company called Pound Hill Software has released a complete software toolkit at the 11th Digital Asset Management (DAM) Symposium in Los Angeles on November 14-15, 2005. MetaGrove is the world’s first integrated suite of software tools for Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform. The comprehensive, robust toolkit consists of MetaGrove Developer, MetaGrove Plug-ins for Adobe’s Creative Suite, and MetaGrove XTension for QuarkXPress.
Secrets of Podcasting
By: Erik Vlietinck
March 26, 2006
0 comments
Bart Farkas write this book on podcasting before the release of GarageBand 3. It therefore contains many tips and tricks that are only useful to you if you’re working with a Windows PC, or if you stubbornly insist on using inefficient software.
Forrester on Press Content and Managing It on the Web
By: Erik Vlietinck
December 26, 2005
0 comments
Internet-based news is forcing the press industry to rethink its online strategies and the use of Web content management (WCM). In 2005, Forrester interviewed 20 leading European and North American press organizations about WCM adoption, pain points, and future plans.
Design for the Scent of Information
By: Erik Vlietinck
November 10, 2005
0 comments
Jared Spool is CEO and co-founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a think tank. They advise clients how to design their browser-based systems for the best information retrieval experience possible. This includes web sites, but also knowledge management systems --nowadays better known as enterprise content management systems.
