for those who are interested in what roger frank is doing, a new era has emerged over at http://www.fadedpage.net. gone is the proofing interface -- poof! -- replaced by this:
We are working on a software program to be used for distributed proofreading. All known interfaces to distributed proofreading sites are browser-based. As envisioned, this one is not. Instead, it is an application that runs as a program on the user's machine and communicates to the server only for page texts and images, as required.
sometimes it amuses me what roger pretends not to know. he has said that he reads my posts here, so he does indeed know that i have programmed such an offline proofing tool. to jog all your memories, my app is called "banana cream"... oh, and based on my experience, i can tell you that it's much more intelligent to download the text and images in a batch, rather than one-by-one "as required" by an individual proofer. (which means roger's model is flawed, but what else is new?)
The client-side application is working. It has been developed as a proofing/formatting tool. However with a local copy of text and images for a project, it has proven effective for post-processing. In fact, it seems so thorough, it appears to be very useful as a preprocessing tool.
i've been demonstrating for years now that roger should be making changes in _preprocessing_, rather than expecting proofers to do it, or doing checks during _postprocessing_... so i'm glad the message has _finally_ been received... better late than never, that's what they say. roger goes on to show some screenshots, like this one:
compare that to one of my screenshots from earlier this year, which just happened to be using a book from fadedpage.net:
or, if you prefer, go look at the version dating back to 2007:
it's fine to reprogram the wheel. doesn't mean you invented it. -bowerbird