
Another Alice Adventure!
 
                                                Alice's Doors
                           Copyright 1995 by Peter Neuendorffer


Alice is working on Doors, a step to advance the paperless office.
Alice, the noted designer, and my friend, sat across from me in front
of her new desk. Our reflections grinned back at us from the vast smoked glass desktop. Across the room, a wall hanging glowed a dim grey, with the word ready flashing in the top left. A microphone hung from the ceiling. Alice pushed some buttons, and the middle of the desk glowed, as though a monitor was underneath it. She brought up other patches of light. The entire desktop was a touch screen, and the patches could be switched around with a tap. She could also write on these patches with a light pen, or use a virtual keyboard - like an air guitar - or in more mundane terms, a standard keyboard or mouse.

From one program she printed a report. When she touched the corner of that patch, it opened up slightly so she could remove the report. Any patch could be propped up perpendicular to the desk top for easier reading.   The wall hanging was a literal image of the entire desktop. Alice used a pointing device attached to her finger, which she waved about to manipulate the cursor. Also, when taking voice dictation, she could edit the text as it appeared.  Various places on her easy-chair were pre-programmed to cause commands when tapped. Both the desktop and the wall hanging had Zoom In features.  "It retails for $999.00" she said, and turned off the screens so we could see our reflections once more bobbing in the ether.

Peter Neuendorffer and his friend Alice bring us brief glimpses into their world, where the impossible can become plausible.  Peter is a Windows programmer and is a regular contributor to WindoWatch.

Acrobat continued:
Some info gleaned from Adobe's Acrobat Web area:

Adobe's ATM technology for rendering Type 1 fonts has been built into Acrobat Reader 2.1 for Windows so it is no longer necessary to install ATM on Windows systems. Previously, you needed ATM running to be able to use the Reader.

Acrobat Reader 2.1 accepts some specially enabled plug-ins, such as Weblink and Movie. This allows Acrobat Reader users to take advantage of new capabilities in PDF files created with Acrobat Exchange,  for example following WWW  URL links or viewing QuickTime and AVI (Win only) movies within a PDF document. 

Although Reader 2.1 is Win95 compatible, it is not yet Win95 logo compliant. This means they will run under Win95 but may not meet all of Microsoft's guidelines for complete Win95 compliance, such as various user interface elements, long filenames, etc. A Win95 logo-compliant verions of Acrobat Reader is scheduled for early 1996. 

For those with HP III printers (PCL) you should upgrade your printer driver. You need the file HPPCL5.EXE available on CIS and from Microsoft's download service (206-936-6735). Adobe is also offering a several new FREE plug-ins for use with the Acrobat Reader 2.1 and Acrobat Exchange 2.x See the Acrobat Web site for details (http://www.adobe.com/Acrobat)
                         ww


