Flip Album 4.x | PC Community Computer Users Group | |||
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Flip Album 4.x The documentation is a small 70-page booklet, which suggests that the program is easy to use. I find an error on the first page I read. There is a good Table of Contents. Artsy green type and small font may make it difficult for some to read. Good task-oriented writing is a plus for folks who want to do something now. The procedures are well titled, short and to the point. There is a one-page Quick Guide.
The box is nice and gives a great overview with pictures inside the cover of how to use the program. The inside cover, with its overview of the product, is a great tool to hook a purchaser or start up a savvy user. Now for another look at the booklet. It starts with the license, then warrantee, a 4-page feature list and then the Quick Start section. On to the Installation. Section 2.2 in the book covers installation. Forget it. Shove the CD in the drive and let Install Shield begin. Haaaah! While we wait for Install Shield to appear, lets look at the System requirements: Required Operating Systems:Windows 95, 98, NT4.0, 2000, XP, and ME. These are the same requirements for optimum performance. IBM PC compatible Pentium 166MHz or better minimum; for optimum performance you need Pentium II 300 MHz or better. RAM is 32 MB minimum; best performance 64 MB. 70 MB free space on your hard drive. To view and share your albums you need IE 5.0 or better.
So far very reasonable requirements and I don’t need an upgrade. The product did an auto-start off the CD and has been waiting for me with a menu of four choices. These are Install, View a sample (must install first), Install IE 5.5, and Exit. They all have informative mouse-over text. The manual lists IE 5.0 not 5.5. This is nice but we actually only have three valid choices unless we return to this menu after install to look at the sample? I click Install and Install Shield starts with a few simple prompts and in no more than a minute we are at the Read Me file in Notepad. It has Info not in manual and some scary notes about populating files all over your hard drive. I wonder if I really really want to install this. I select Start > FlipAlbum and I am given options to Start the product , View Sample or Help. Now I am prompted for the Product ID so I register the product. View Sample shows a good example of FlipAlbum and its use in creating a marketing brochure. There is a What’s New page. The sample includes a free FlipViewer and a free 30-day trial of FlipAlbum.
As soon as I got comfortable clicking on the left page to page backward through the book I reached page 13 which had a URL to the Online Store and resulted in a prompt to open IE. Since I was not on the Internet, I got an error message. I could right-mouse to restart the book or go to different pages in the book. I never became comfortable clicking pates to navigate within the book. Audio on page 5 is an endless loop, which was mildly annoying. The help is the same as the manual in organization, content and the occasional error. Good graphic examples which are very readable on the screen. The index and search pages have well-named keywords. Note: Creating Multi-Object Pages is really Inserting Multi-Media Objects.
File > Open gives me the option of importing a whole directory as an album. I happen to have a folder containing photos. So I go for it. Vroom! and I have a nice album of 41 photos in under a minute! I viewed it as slide show too. This is great! How about adding a photo to this album? I just inserted the photo as a multimedia object. To rearrange photos, just right click on the thumbnail and move it. This was very easy after I learned to move it so that the image after it has a pink highlight. I was never able to move a photo to the end but always had to move the last photo forward. The contents and index automatically update! It is easy to rename the pages from the thumbnails or on the Contents page where you can see longer titles. I tried to save the book with an illegal name but FlipAlbum showed an alert message and renamed file with a corrected Internet-legal name. This is excellent!
Adding comments is easy. Just click the annotation icon on the toolbar and enter text. Change the text properties in the annotation toolbar – typeface, color, size, bold, italic, underline, alignment, or bullets. At first the controls seemed sparse, but if you use the close box then you really don’t need an Exit button. I got into resizing the text box, but it took several tries to discover that if I clicked the margin of the comment box, the frame around the box would go away. At first I seemed to leave the frame there. Right-click to edit the annotation; but if you want to delete the whole annotation you have to select and delete it all. Changing the book title and background to one of the standard backgrounds was very easy. There is a nice, if small, library of titles and backgrounds. I was not able to remove the name FlipAlbum from the cover but could add annotations to the cover. I did not create my own cover and would have liked to do that. It took me two tries to add a multimedia file. Although the insert dialog box looks like the usual open file dialogue you must drag and drop. I did not find a way to resize video images so some had satisfactory resolution but others had very poor resolution although in real player or the MS viewer the images were fine. When I view the files I can import as thumbnails (not filenames) some of the thumbnails are titled “Invalid Image” which leads me to believe they can’t be imported. However, it appears that they are invalid only for viewing as a thumbnail. Right click an image to rotate it, or change the size, or layout position.
I thought I saw frames around photos at the demo so I thought something named window frame would let me do that? I think window frame is a misnomer. I used window frame and then was stuck with no toolbar or menu bar. The docs say click View on the menu bar to turn the toolbar on or off. But if I am in window view I have no menu bar and unfortunately F2 stopped working! Help, I’m stuck. But the fabulous right click saves me. This product uses context menus extensively. I added some mp3 and .wav files to the album. They played at first but then next time I used some they played only when I clicked the Music icon. Then FlipAlbum gave me error messages about no player being open, access violation, etc. and I had to use Task Manager to close the program. I had this happen several times with multimedia (video) and music files.
Publishing the book was easy and it ran in the viewer. I started the viewer album by clicking the FACDVIEW icon in the folder with the name of my book. It’s too bad that the application always names the new book FACDVIEW. The FACD.dll suggests that maybe it won’t work if I rename the file. I would prefer to have the file named for the book and not have to find my file buried in a directory. The viewer has its own help system. There are about 6 MB of files produced. I did not try to write it to CDROM.
I would rather have an arrow or icon to move pages. Using clicks on the pages seems too different from traditional ways of editing and navigating through a document. Editing, selection, and navigation are too restricted for the person creating the Album but nice for the person viewing the album. Maybe I did not understand the intent but the following things felt awkward: Selecting — I never feel sure that I have the item and feel surprised when it works. No page up and down keys on keyboard worked so I could click to select items for editing. I am used to clicking on things and being able to edit them, not clicking to move to the next page. There are more functions associated with the right mouse button than I expected. I expect to see all functions on the menu-bar and some on the context menu. AVI resolution was often not good and hard to play in slide show. This is a very nice product. Because of the differences from the interfaces that I have used, I have to relearn every time I revisit the program. I have not used the menus as much as I usually would because I feel forced to use the right-click menus.
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Product Information:Flip Album 4.x MSRP $49.95 |
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Last Updated on March 9, 2008 12:10 PM by Webmaster