The Pachyderm 2.1.0 specification has been posted on the PachyForge Web site. The public is encouraged to post their comments and questions on this forum.
Best,
Scott

Josh, Scott, Rachel, Clayton, et al who are involved--

These are some exciting improvements:

• Not only the - Timeline Comparison - Multi Comparison - Dual Comparison, but also the
- Full-screen movie player
- Full-screen image viewer
- Full-screen swf player [which we formerly called the “Shell screen”]

• Obviously, the Section 508 compliance is huge, including “All templates that play media (audio, video) having the capability to present accessibility data, such as transcripts for audio, alternate text and descriptive text for images.

• “Home” button added to root border [something for which we’ve long known there was a need]

• 2.1.14: FLV playback support for AV media in all relevant templates [Is that embedded or pop-up?]

• Option to link out from Aspects and Enlargement screens [Smart: no dead ends… although with links out from the Series, too, I do foresee the risk of endless wandering without getting to the end of the idea you started to grasp!]

• Option to use thumbnails “instead or in addition to text” on Exploration Entry [Great: mix it up a bit and vary the look-and-feel between presentations]

• Mid-ground (background) images option added for all templates and is available at individual screen level [along that same line—very graphically empowering]

• Resolve issues in properly handling apostrophes in text [Finally!], as well as Consistent HTML and diacritical rendering in all template text areas [Yea!]

• 2.2.7.2. Built-in Series Zoom screen design and functionality identical to separate Zoom Template except for addition of paging [in other words, Series will now support audio!]

Plus:
• a migration tool that will “only need to be run once” [Visionary!!!]
• The installer as well as a stand-alone application will include a wizard that steps the lay user through first-time configuration of Pachyderm.
• The process for creating new installers (for subsequent releases) will be documented clearly, and the documentation will be placed on SourceForge and PachyForge

Other significant improvements redressing legacy vestiges that I am less directly familiar with but have heard rumors of and that sound like a good idea:
• All institution-specific legacy libraries and .NET dependencies will be removed from the Pachyderm code

Standalone application. This is unclear to me. Can one install Pachy on the desktop? I assume it still must be served over the network, no?

Kudos on all the good work. Very clear.

Hey Peter-

Thanks for the vote of encouragement. The 2.1.0 spec is ambitious and very exciting.

I wanted to address a couple of your questions.

1) Yes, the FLV playback will be embedded rather than in a pop-up. You can see an example in Integrating the Arts as well as the George Morrison section of Foot in Two Worlds.

2) The full screen SWF or "shell" template is now available on SourceForge and is used for each of the 6 interactives within Integrating the Arts.

3) Pachyderm as a standalone application... The current version can run on a laptop, or desktop without a network. We have a Windows install on our laptop that we created all the MDL work with. I know Tim had a working instance on a MacBook running in BootCamp or Parallels (not sure which). That said, you still need Apache, Java and MySQL running, so it's a bit more complicated that an application like Photoshop.

Glad to have your "Pachy Elder" wisdom here on PachyForge.

-Scott

psamis wrote:

QUOTE:
Standalone application. This is unclear to me. Can one install Pachy on the desktop? I assume it still must be served over the network, no?

I'm wondering, when you say 'stand-alone application', are you getting this from 3.3:

QUOTE:
The installer as well as a stand-alone application will
include a wizard that steps the user through first-time
configuration of Pachyderm.

Because this refers to the wizard being a stand-alone app, not Pachyderm. We want to allow basic configuration to happen through a wizard, instead of requiring admins to hack data files and data tables by hand.

The 2.1.0 spec sounds great. A question about application configuration: will the sounds associated with various templates be configurable such that they can be turned off if desired (disabled)? I recall some discussion of this being included in 2.1.

CindyWalters wrote:

QUOTE:
The 2.1.0 spec sounds great. A question about application configuration: will the sounds associated with various templates be configurable such that they can be turned off if desired (disabled)? I recall some discussion of this being included in 2.1.

Yes, that is in the 2.1.X specification, but not in the 2.1.0 release. There is a great desire to add a number of program customization options to the authoring GUI. We take these requests seriously, but want to focus on improvements to the core application before moving on to these much needed additions. If things go well, we will will release a few versions beyond 2.1.0 within the next calendar year.
In the mean time, we will work on posting some documentation on how to customize the current sound file. It's not to hard if you have a copy of Flash.