Vista Launch, Turning the Pages
Well, it’s finally here and the official launch of the UK edition of Windows Vista yesterday in London proved to be a somewhat surreal event, peppered with appearances by Bill Gates and a turn from the band The Feeling (for no good reason that I could see…). Anyway, it was held at the British Library and Vista’s many and various features were ably demonstrated. I won’t bore you with the details of the new operating system, regular visitors will already have a pretty good idea of what it is all about and the media is bound to be stuffed with Vista stories, but one part of the launch that may not get the coverage it deserves was the simultaneous launch of Turning The Pages 2.0.
This is a development of the ingenious book and document viewer that quite literally lets you turn the pages and gets you as close to the experience of handling a real book or text as it is possible to get on a PC monitor screen. The Vista connection is two-fold, firstly version 2.0 has been developed for the Windows Vista platform, and secondly, Bill Gates and the British Library have been collaborating to unite two of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks or ‘Codecs’ for the first time in 500 years (Bill has the Leicester Codex, the British Library’s is called Arundel).
You’ll need reasonably nippy Vista-capable PC to see what it can do but there’s a pretty good Shockwave demo on the website that lets you get a feel for it. Putting da Vinci’s codecs, and ultimately millions of other important and unique documents online in this way will make them more accessible and this is particularly useful for scholars and academics, who can use the software to add comments and annotations. You can expect to see and hear a lot more of this remarkable feature in years to come.
Tags: bill_gates, british_library, codecs, codex, da_vinci, da_vincis, firstly, good_reason, launch, leicester, librarys, literally, pc_monitor, remarkable_feature, shockwave_demo, windows vista
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