Mapping a document: In Trellix, pages are treated as separate objects, easily clicked and dragged to new positions in the area beneath the toolbar.

A software pioneer returns

NEW YORK -- Software designer Dan Bricklin is one of the seminal figures of the Computer Age.

Bricklin is the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, the first killer app. You can make a pretty good argument that Bricklin and VisiCalc are responsible for the microcomputer revolution, since people began buying computers to use VisiCalc.

Almost two decades later, Bricklin has another company and another great piece of software. There's no way to know if Trellix is the next killer app, but it ought to be. Trellix is arguably the first new idea in document creation and processing since the first Mac shipped with a copy of MacWrite.

Most document processors -- Microsoft Word, for example -- are built around the concept of the document. That's probably best for short documents (letters, memos and similar things) but it has serious drawbacks for longer or more complex work. That becomes obvious the first time you try wrestling with headers, footers, a table of contents -- and forget trying anything crazy, like shuffling chapters.

Trellix views content as a collection of objects. The most unusual feature of the program is the document map window, which appears between the task bar and the main work area. Each page appears as a sheet of paper on the map; pages can be grouped into chapters or other divisions, wired into sequences and linked.

Change your mind? You can drag and drop things wherever you like. You can export Trellix documents as HTML, or even bundle them as self-extracting files complete with hyperlinks, graphics and animations.

You can download a trial version from http://www.trellix.com It's such a fresh take on this type of software that you should check it out.

Macromedia was another booth offering something out of the ordinary. The company was showing off its usual software -- Freehand, Director, Flash -- but also had two new offerings, Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

Dreamweaver may be the best web authoring tool on the market. For one thing, it is designed to allow you to work simultaneously in WYSIWYG and text modes.

It lacks the site management tools of Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe SiteMill, but produces pristine HTML and DHTML. One of Dreamweaver's best features is its ability to preserve imported HTML (most WYSIWYG tools chew up HTML when it is imported, inserting their own tags).

Dreamweaver may be just a couple of months old, but it was already old news at the Macromedia booth. The new news was Fireworks, an image editing program in beta. Macromedia is pitching Fireworks as a total web image creation and production tool. Fireworks is designed to handle image editing, palette optimization, size optimization (and therefore speed), and just about anything else you might want to do to an on-line graphic.

Since all this work takes place in a single program, everything stays editable. This is a great improvement over the current process, where you might use two or three programs for these tasks -- and have to start over in the first program for even minor editing.

You can download trial versions of both from the Macromedia web site at http://www.macromedia.com/.

More image magic was going on over at the Altamira Group's booth, where Genuine Fractals and Genuine Fractals Pro were being put through their paces.

The two Fractals are plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop.

The more interesting of the two is Genuine Fractals Pro, which encodes raster images and turns them into scalable, reusable assets. Translation: Digitize your images once, then reuse them at a variety of sizes and resolutions.

The clever folks at Altamira were throwing images up on giant monitors, then reformatting and resizing them on the fly. (You could tell when a graphics person walked by the booth from the double-takes -- and the drooling.)

Genuine Fractals Pro, according to the company, renders images at multiple resolutions -- in other words, resolution on demand. The software also renders a cropped image, and can do so at sizes larger than the original input.

You can find out more at http://www.altamira-group.com/, the company's web site.

Altamira Group Inc., (800) 913-3391; Macromedia Inc., (415) 252-2000; Trellix Corp., (781) 788-9400.

-- CJF

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.