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April 25, 2007
PageMaker 1.0, today?
PageMaker 1.0, today? In a philosophical mood... the link goes to Peter C.S. Adams, who describes the radical evolution which occurred when anyone could lay out paper presentations: "When the Aldus Corporation introduced PageMaker 1.0, it revolutionized the publishing industry. Suddenly anyone could design brochures. Publishers had to become computer literate, and Apple started selling Macintoshes and LaserWriters in large numbers." What made PageMaker possible? Laurens Leurs describes the unique innovations of Adobe PostScript: a single-implementation graphics programming language which ran on devices of various brands, formfactors, and operating systems... any manufacturer could license this predictable universal capability, uniting creative abilities across devices... and the file format was openly documented so that anyone could build atop this understructure. That was 25 years ago, and led to the explosion of desktop publishing, which helped democratize computing power from Big Brother to the people -- the predictable PostScript file format directly led to the range of computing and communications power we enjoy today. Now in 2007, you could think of Flash as the PostScript of the Web, crossing devices, being freely usable by everyone, providing the understructure for a potential massive increase in human abilities. But for us here, in modern days, what would be the equivalent of PageMaker, to unleash that power to wide numbers of people? And if you were to design and engineer a PageMaker of the Web today, then how would you do go about doing so...?
Posted by JohnDowdell at April 25, 2007 08:15 PM
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Hello, John, thanks for the link.
Assuming your question was not rhetorical, here are a few thoughts on what features might be in a PageMaker of the Web 1.0 today:
1. WYSIWYG graphical CSS style support.
2. Drag and drop text and media (including Flash) placement.
3. Easy to use JPEG and Flash creation and editing tool
4. Drag and drop integration with back end database.
All of these, of course, are already available in some form, but not in the same product and not always in an easy to use form.
5. Site and page design pasteboard that allows users to use "sketch out" their site and turn that into a template.
6. Drag and drop site map feature that keeps a site map up to date but also automatically applies changed template items and updates links (and even creates links and blank pages if needed) when an item is created or dragges from one place to another.
7. A scripting system for the rest of us. I remember when anyone could be a web designer. Now it's a field largely for programmers. I'd like to see a sort of HyperCard for the web that's so easy to program my mom could create an interactive web page for the family reunion.
I'm sure others can think of more, but that would be a great start. The most important thing to keep in mind is simplicity. This doesn't necessarily mean dropping features, just making them accessible and obvious. This is something Apple is very good at and Adobe isn't, so a collaboration might be useful.
Great philosophical thought for a rainy Friday morning!
--peter
Posted by: Peter C.S. Adams at April 27, 2007 06:35 AM