I’m not planning on installing Vista anytime soon, but if you happen to
have access to a new Vista machine you should take a look at the
updated version of British
Library Turning The Pages.
The application developer, Tim Sneath, makes it sound like a pretty
nice thing to behold! (btw, the WPF mentioned by Tim is for Windows
Presentation Foundation- it has something to do with Vista) Oh, reading
further
in Tim’s blog I see that it may be possible to view this wonderment
using XP as long as you have .NET 3.0 installed (and probably IE7)..
Comments
5 Responses to “Show off Vista with a Library example”
IE6 or IE7 will work.
.Net Framework 3.0 does require that your XP machine has XP SP2 installed.
Windows Update has just added .Net Framework 3.0 as an optional install, so if you are familiar with using Windows Update, you could install it that way. If not, follow Tim’s links.
Thanks, Rob Relyea
Program Manager, WPF Team
http://rrelyea.spaces.live.com
Thanks Rob, I noticed 3.0 just this past weekend as I was reinstalling XP on my home machine. Chose not to grab it, not being aware of anything that used it – what else is it good for to me, the end user?
It looks purty, but until the interface improves it’s just eye candy. Dragging the mouse across the screen to turn the page (or hitting a button, or whatever) isn’t the same as physically lifting and turning the page… There have been Flash (and other) versions of this for some time now, but it’s always felt more like a gimmick than anything really revolutionary. How is this REALLY better than a high resolution .pdf of scanned images from a book?
Hi there Paul,
.NET Framework 3.0 is an enabling technology, rather than an application in its own right – a bit like Flash, QuickTime or Java, if you’ve ever been prompted to download any of those. There are an increasing number of other applications that rely on it, particularly since it’s included within Windows Vista. It doesn’t impose any overhead on your machine unless you’re actually using an application that requires it, so it’s something that’s just useful to have installed.
Oh, and in a minor correction, I’m not actually the developer of the British Library’s application – although I’d be proud to have it credited to me, the real developers are a company called Armadillo Systems, who you can find here: http://www.armadillosystems.com/
Hope you enjoy the application – it’s the subject of ongoing development and improvement, so you’ll see more books added (and more features for interacting with books) over time.
Best wishes,
Tim Sneath
Group Manager, Windows Vista Evangelism
Microsoft Corp.
D’Arcy, to be fair, I don’t think it’s intended to be much more than eye candy; you and I are never going to get a chance to physically turn the pages of these priceless works, so a high-res scan with some sense of turning the pages is as close as we’re likely to get. I did get .Net 3.0 installed on the MacBook, and while it was a little slow, it was pretty… 🙂
Tim, thanks for the clarification and pointer to Armadillo, which I now see was also in your original post. Congrats also on getting Vista out the door!