speaking of pudding, "banana-cream" is ready. greg asked, a while back, for demonstrations of how online page-scans might be incorporated into the e-book experience. this is one entry. i used the text of jon noring's "my antonia" version, which can be obtained from the openreader site: http://www.openreader.org/myantonia the text is presented to the end-user, page by page. the end-user can then just click a button to download the scan-image for a specific page to be displayed too. (for instance, if they wanted to check a possible error.) the scan-image is retrieved from the openreader site. when an image is downloaded, it's stored on your machine, and any further accesses are made using that local copy... the option is also given to download _all_ of the images in a batch, in either a foreground or background process. that's what a pre-processor or post-processor from d.p. might do, so they could work throughout the entire book. an end-user might also choose to download all the scans, if they wanted to see how the physical book itself looked. (to do this another way for the demo, download the .zip file of all the image-scans from the openreader site to begin with.) i also threw in text-to-speech, because it was easy, so the computer can read you the text as you view the scan. text-to-speech _does_ work on newer p.c. systems, but might not work automatically on older ones, i'm not sure. of course, macs have had text-to-speech for over a decade. this is a demo-app, so it's not polished, and has no docs. if people like it, and ask me to polish it up, i certainly can. but i anticipate that the reaction from here will be silence. sorry to spoil your "bowerbird makes vaporware" fun... banana-cream currently runs on the mac, from os8.1 up, including o.s.x., and on windows, from windows98 up. if there are any linux users who want to alpha-test for me, speak up. i'll be uploading banana-cream to the web next week; but anyone who would like to use it before then can backchannel me for a preview copy... screenshots:
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/bc--1.jpg http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/bc-03.jpg http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/bc003.jpg
(i put one error on each scan, for "where's waldo" fans.) -bowerbird