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Richard Godfrey

Software Architecture, Engineering and Stuff
Is this the magazine of the Future?

On the run up to the Vista launch I had been speaking with Paul Douglas and Richard Keith at Future Publishing (just down the road from me in Bath) about taking some of their content and hosting it in the cool WPF Turning the Pages application. I think the online preview of the Official Windows Vista Magazine looks fantastic in the full WPF 3D environment (despite the ugly mug on page 10!) and is clearly the most engaging online magazine environment I've come across. Is this the future of magazine publishing where we save the forests? or is the Daily Mail or New York Times readers that offer the best reading experience? I think realism of the 3D page flipping is amazing for graphically rich reading experiences and the 'Flow Layout' features of WPF that are highlighted in the newspaper readers are a fresh and typographically accurate way to read text easily. Maybe the combination of the two is where we need to head next?

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Anyway, why not try it out here and let me know what you think?

Posted: Friday, March 09, 2007 4:56 PM by rgodfrey

Comments

bradc said:

What? you mean exactly how I have been reading all the "free" industry mag's for a LONG time now with Zinio?...and I can read them from any platform, not just Windows.  So what is the benefit in doing it with WPF?

# March 9, 2007 12:54 PM

rgodfrey said:

Yep, I've been using Zinio for years too (and been pretty happy with it), but this is a completely different user experience. I don't think you can compare the typical flash 2D maths generated page turns (that we also do with WPF/E in a cross-platform and cross-browser way - so this isn't a dig at Flash!) with a genuine 3 dimensional model which you can pick up, turn to the angle you want to view from and get the effects of a nice lighting model all using hardware acceleration from your 3D video card. Just my take, so if the Zinio 2D maths stuff is good enough for some folks that's cool with me.

# March 9, 2007 1:04 PM

bradc said:

I just gave it a try.  It was alright, but perhaps my XP machine wasn't adequate enough to get the real user experience out of it.  (AMD Athlon 1Ghz, 1 GB RAM, Nvidia FX 5500, WinXP SP2)

I couldn't get the page flipping to work as I expected it to.  Basically I could only click on a page to have it turn...rather than dragging from the edge or corner and having the page flip as the curser moves.  

I also had a rough time moving or rotating the magazine as well. Again, that was probably my machines poor specs rather than the design of the software.

I would try it on my better machines but those are both running Ubuntu and MacOS X so I am out of luck there.  

# March 9, 2007 2:54 PM

rgodfrey said:

Hi Brad, Great that you've given in a try! and sorry to hear you're not geting the best experiences on that hardware! I've run it on older and slower machines than you've described with solid results - our testing included various 3+ year old machines (such as a 3 year old Toshiba laptop with on-board graphics) and we typically had good results (video card drivers were the cause of poorer experiences - are you on the latest drivers?). A desktop with a (sub £100) nVidia 7900 driving it at 2000+ resolution was just amazing. Less than 1GB of memory does pose some difficulties as each page loads two 300K images (front & back).

We originally had the typical page drag experience you were expecting but the professional user testing we did suggested that a simple click and hold was more straightforward for most users - not sure I really agree, but that was the feedback from real users so we went with it :-)

Maybe you could add an eval Vista partition to your other machines? Running it under Vista is an even nicer experience than XP due to 4x anti-aliasing, virtualised driver memory, etc. especially if you have a decent quality video driver.

# March 11, 2007 7:22 PM

bradc said:

Okay, I tried it again and this time it actually worked much better.  Not sure why it gave me such issues the first time.

One thing I didn't like was the angle of viewing the magazine (looking down at it).  Is there a way to tilt the magazine up more for easier viewing?  

# March 12, 2007 2:18 AM

Nicholas said:

Wow this is really nice,i tested it with Vista

AMD 2000+ Xp

756 RAM

and Radeon 9200 64mb

for a real experiance you need newer Video Card

Looks Good

Thanks

# March 12, 2007 9:42 AM

rgodfrey said:

Hiya Brad,

Glad to hear it is working better now.

If you keep left Shift key down while clicking and dragging the mouse you have control over the orientation - essentially you have a trackball capability and can move the whole magazine/book in 3D space to get the viewing angle that suits you best. Using Ctrl and using the mouse allows you to drag the book around. You could also try the amazing books over on the British Library website which is on a much better server infrastructure over at http://ttpdownload.bl.uk

# March 12, 2007 1:25 PM

rgodfrey said:

Thanks Nicholas. Yep, a decent DirectX 9 card makes the world of difference - at the Vista launch we showcased it with Radeon 1950s on 30" monitors and the immersiveness was fantastic. Glad you enjoyed it.

# March 12, 2007 1:27 PM

bradc said:

Very Nice, looks so much better after you change the viewing angle....I must say, I am Impressed with this more than I thought I would be.

# March 12, 2007 4:57 PM

rgodfrey said:

Cool. Thanks for perseveering with it Brad.

# March 12, 2007 7:45 PM
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