Though we've written extensively about this product in the past (see The Cole Papers, September 1994; October 1994), it was interesting to note that Seybold Contributing Editor David Neeff looked beyond the product's existing features.

"With the use of AppleScripting," said Neeff, referring to the Mac's macro programming language, "we believe ALS can be the basis for a truly automated production scheme for both small and large publications at an effective price."

This archiving product has come a long way since we saw it at NEXPO '94 (see The Cole Papers, September 1994). We complained then that the natural language search engine returned stories ranked by the probability of the search's success. Andover, Mass.-based Cascade has alleviated this problem with a filtering concept that allows the results to be sorted any way the user wishes.

With client software for both Mac and Windows, a big sale to what we might call a Major East Coast Daily, and as another company that has an investment relationship with Adobe, Cascade is poised to give the traditional suppliers of archiving technology a run for their shekels.

KPT installs into any imaging program that supports the Adobe plug-in architecture (Photoshop, etc.). It performs unsharp masking and offers large-image gaussian blur features, as well as a number of other imaging filters to alter hues, colors, tints and contrast. HSC is based in Carpinteria, Calif.

We found NaviPress the more interesting of the two. The creation of World-Wide Web pages -- which use hypertext to send the user from one page to another -- is inherently difficult. NaviPress provides a method to visually organize the links between pages, providing a flow chart of all the links that have been embedded.

Further, the product provides for a method of cut-and-paste to allow a Web page author to skip having to type in the long, cumbersome code of the page links (commonly called URLs, or Uniform Resource Locators).

The company from Needham, Mass., says NaviPress is available for Windows now and is in beta testing for Macintosh.

Developed in conjunction with Victor Co. of Japan (JVC), Xposure is an image manipulation application that deals with objects, rather than layers.

Because it never alters the original image until it is saved, and since each manipulation step is broken up into a directory, steps can be removed, copied, altered and otherwise edited before the final image is saved to disk.

The Seybold editors said the product has "made significant changes to the current paradigms in ways we feel will simplify image editing."

The other winners for innovation were the International Color Consortium for the Color Profiles Initiative and IBM for its Query by Image Content technology.

Other winners for excellence included:

-- dmc

Cascade Systems Inc.,
(508) 794-8000, e-mail: malcolm@cascade.com;
HSC Software Inc.,
(805) 566-6200;
Managing Editor Software Inc.,
(215) 886-5662;
Navisoft Inc.
(617) 449-3300, e-mail: customer@navisoft.com;
Quark Inc.,
(303) 894-8888, e-mail: quarktech@aol.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, May 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.