Thanks for the Feedback

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Thank you to those who posted comments or send me feedback regarding the Document Presentation motion design I posted earlier this week. A few of you asked how the software will be used.

Here are the steps in a typical document presentation workflow:

1. You can open any PDF or standard graphic file (PNG, TIFF, JPG, GIF, etc...). Spotlight will be great for finding PDF files containing specific text.

2. The document will be displayed in the center of the window, or you can view in full screen mode.

3. When you drag a selection box around an important region, that region will zoom in similar to the quicktime files I posted in the last blog.

4. The zoomed call out will be smart enough to avoid overlapping or being cut off by the edge of the screen. However, you will be able to drag the call out or full page to a new location if you wish.

5. You will be able to reverse the callouts to view the entire page alone as it was originally displayed.

6. Finally, you should be able to export the call out animation as a Quicktime movie for cross-platform use with Powerpoint or Keynote.

That is how the basic workflow will go. I am also looking into providing a means to add document annotations like highlights and sketching. I would also like to add support for multiple pages / callouts but these advanced features will be a lower priority than having a very intuitive and high quality single call out functionality as this is probably what people will use 90% of the time. In fact the more advanced features may come in a second version or a "pro" version. January 1, 2006 is my goal for the first commercial release date, but that depends on how our other projects go.

Of course, none of these designs are final. In fact, the reason that I am posting them on the blog is to get customer feedback on them, so please keep up the insightful comments!