The CD-ROM of CD-ROMsÖ (The Consumer's Guide to CD-ROM)
Front End Version 2.01, June 21, 1994
Database current as of June 30, 1994
Copyright ⌐ 1993-1994 Resource International Publishing Co. (RIPC), All Rights Reserved. Marble textures from WrapturesÖ Two, Copyright ⌐ 1992 Form and Function.
Resource International Publishing Co.
Route 1, Box 168
Milford, TX 76670
(817) 582-7373 Info & Tech Support
(817) 582-7377 Fax
(800) 254-2442 Order Hotline
CIS: 70053,1702
GEnie: DMJ
Internet: jschwenk@delphi.com
dmj@genie.geis.com
____________________________________
The CD-ROM of CD-ROMs was produced using the Renaissance multimedia authoring tool, developed by RIPC.
Programming: Damien M. Jones
Database: Jan R. Schwenk
James E. Ivey
Editing: Jan R. Schwenk
Damien M. Jones
Robert C. Glover
James E. Ivey
Help: Robert C. Glover
Damien M. Jones
Art: Damien M. Jones
Form and Function
Reviews: Lots of people
Moral support: Tippy (the dog)
Chester (the BIG dog)
Wolf (the WILD dog)
In Memory: Jay Miner, father of the Amiga and Atari 8-bit computers
(Things seem to be degenerating here...)
Inspiration: Sting (Ten Summoner's Tales)
Bruce Hornsby (Harbor Lights)
Whitney Houston (I'm Your Baby Tonight)
The Alan Parsons Project (Many)
Depeche Mode (Songs of Faith and Devotion)
Tension relief: MidiMaze
Tempest 2000
Doom
Car & Driver Magazine
Donuts in the parking lot
Star Trek (all)
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Well, that should just about cover the credits aspect. Since there was some space left over, I (dmj) thought I would slip in a few comments where few would find them...
Some people may be wondering why we went to such pains to design a "new" interface. Why not just use Microsoft's interface design standards? (Warning: if you think Microsoft and Windows are the greatest things that ever were, don't bother to read this. It is highly opinionated.)
We elected not to use "traditional" Windows for several reasons. Which was most important is hard to say, because they all played a factor; so in no particular order, those reasons are:
1. Despite its claims to the contrary, Windows is not the easiest graphical user interface (GUI) to use. We examined the Windows interface in detail, looking for places where the interface standards promoted by Microsoft slowed down or inconvenienced the user. What we found was startling--in so many ways, Windows completely misses the mark on usability. We also examined other systems' GUIs in an attempt to find alternative methods that worked (we found some).
2. The burden of accepting all things Microsoft was just too much. I will avoid the long list of programmer's gripes, because they are technical and there's just too many of them, but we simply were not prepared to be completely dependent on Microsoft for our interface and inner program workings (by using their libraries and their standards). Microsoft controls enough just by owning the operating system, thank you. If we used all of their tools, they would have even more control over how our product looked than we were comfortable with.
3. We wanted our product to be visually distinctive. Before writing the CoC front end software, we examined several authoring tools that were available. Without exception, we found the lack of control over low-level interface features a major flaw--with almost all of those tools, any product created with it looked like every other product created with that tool. The fact that we could look at a lot of multimedia titles--especially multimedia database titles--and tell exactly what tool they used to create it was very disheartening. We had an idea of where we wanted to go with CoC, and we couldn't find a tool that would let us go there. So we wrote a simple program (CoC 1) that would suffice until we could get our own tool (Renaissance) to the point where we could use it for CoC. CoC 2 was created with Renaissance, and it barely scratches the surface of what we can do with it; we are still expanding the capabilities of Renaissance and CoC.
4. We list multimedia products in CoC; it seemed only appropriate to use a multimedia interface to do so. After all, advertising multimedia is easier when you can do it with multimedia.
We are not finished with our interface. We recognize that there are still areas that need work; we will continue to develop these to make a robust system which is also more flexible than what we could normally use under "standard" Windows. But we felt the impact of the new interface should not wait.
We welcome your feedback. Please tell us what works for you, and what doesn't. And don't just tell us you don't like it because it doesn't work exactly the same as "standard" Windows; that just tells us you're closed-minded and inflexible. We'd like intelligent responses, please.
For a complete list of interface differences, please see the "Interface Tweaks" section of the online help.
One last thing: you may have noticed our help is not standard Windows help. This was, actually, one place where we had intended to use plain-vanilla Windows. But due to some convoluted and strange events here at RIPC, we were unable to create a standard Windows help file in time for this release of CoC. We plan to rectify this soon, either by creating genuine Windows help files for CoC or by writing our own help system.
