Entrepreneurial
Software: Making it Real
During the "first wave" of online interactivity in the 1980's it became clear that the Interaction Design practice needed to handle four important jobs:
Presentation
Production
Transaction
Transformation
The newly emerging interactive online industries needed to build a large number of pages that could be updated easily, were platform independent, and retained some "meta-information" intelligence about themselves. We didn't really have many standards in the interactive industry just yet, so I invented my own data-tagging system. It was crudely XML-ish - but it worked.
Metadata tagging is the expression of Information Architecture.
The separation of data Content from presentational Context allows us to provide Content Integration through Context Management.
TCS Software Products
Here are the products that The Communication Studio put on the market to support the "first wave" of interactive services in the US between 1984 and 1988.
Early TCS collaborator Bill Porter provided substantial programming and inspiration for many of the products described here.
TEXTUP
The TextUp Workstation lets you quickly edit graphically sophisticated pages through a simple Template and Clip Art-driven design tool.
- Edit, merge & highlight Text content
- Merge graphic Clip
- Generate Bar Charts and Histograms
- Custom Font Styles for Text Titling
- Manage your production process
This product was a bit ahead of its time. Basically, it's kind of a rudimentary XML-like meta-information tagging system with a user interface that allows a person with secretarial skills to easily update graphically sophisticated pages safely.
The design principles underlying TextUp re-emerged in this website as The StyleSwitcher.
Textup Clients
TextUp, Show and OTTO had a rebirth in 1990 when I re-engineered those template management techniques into the Electronic Sales Assistant for the Newspaper Association of America.
IMAGE LIBRARY
Our Clip Art imagery was specifically designed for use with TextUp templates. We offered hundreds of images and animations, including corporate logos, product & sports logos, icons, portraits, backgrounds, illustrations, maps, animations, bar chart styles and custom font styles.
Sports team logos, in particular, were integrated powerfully with templates in Otto, the automated version of TextUp.
ENVIRONMENT
This fully-featured site platform was targeted as a standalone information "kiosk" that could be updated online.
- Key-activated shortcuts
- Database Routing Editor controls
- Easy ad insertion & cycling announcements
- "Program intelligence" into specific applications in the database
- Billboarding "attractor" mode, mini-show
presentation
SHOW
This billboard manager lets you create, edit and present a group graphicically-sophisticated pages as an automated -or manually-controlled - "slideshow" that can be displayed on any computergraphic device.
When combined with our TextUp templates and Clip Art, you have .... uhhhh ...
... Actually you have networked, device-independent, updateable, animated PowerPoint-like presentation templates - In 1984.
TextUp, Show and OTTO had a rebirth in 1990 when I re-engineered those template management techniques into the Electronic Sales Assistant for the Newspaper Association of America.
EDNA (EDit NAplps)
This technical tool displays the underlying code of a NAPLPS computergraphic file with referential annotation - Also allows simple editing. It was our first and most fundamental design tool.
Because, of course, once you have a code dis-assembler it also means that you have a code re-assembler.
This fundamental "Rosetta Stone" engine allowed us to take pages apart, tag the parts, and thereby separate Data Content from Presentational Context. Now we have templates, stylesheets, clip art, metadata tags, and the ability to produce data-driven pages - as well as some other nifty stuff.
OTTO
This software page generator engine takes a "bare bones" simple text file, automatically reformats the data in it into graphic templates, and stores the result under a new filename. In many ways, Otto may be viewed simply as an automated version of TextUp.
In the SportsTicker Hockey Score Update example shown here:
Slide 1: The "raw" text-only SportsTicker feed is parsed according to the rules.
Data 1 : Home Team : "New Jersey"
Data 2 : Home Team Score : "2"
Data 3 : Visiting Team : "Montreal"
Data 4 : Visiting Team Score : "0"
Data 5 : Period of Play : "2"
Slide 2: Appropriate Team Logo Clip art is merged in (i.e. The New Jersey Devils logo is matched to "NHL : Home Team : New Jersey")
Slide 3: The finished (enhanced) page is produced:
+ Template
+ Logo Clip Art
+ SportsTicker data
- "Batch" processes a group of files
- Reformats a single file of ASCII text information into
multiple display formats (for different applications.
- Merges graphics on basis of rules
- Generates Bar Charts and histograms on the basis
of the incoming data
TextUp, Show and OTTO had a rebirth in 1990 when I re-engineered those template management techniques into the Electronic Sales Assistant for the Newspaper Association of America.
It was all based on implicit and explicit metadata tagging of information. And since all Otto templates are completely tagged, you can also custom-edit individual pages with our CMS TextUp tool.
Our Software Clients
London (UK) Docklands Development
National Bureau of Standards
Sheridan College
Herman Hospital IFCD