User guide

Page 4
Review: Page MeUp
By Bob van Lier
F
rom time to time, the mailbox at info@ap-
plepickers.org receives some potentially inter-
esting oers. An oer a few weeks ago was from
the publisher of Kinematic, the 2D and 3D animation
tool. The publisher, SoftoBe is piloting a new tool
called PageMeUp. The software is a simple tool for
mocking up e-books or websites. The user creates a
series of text or image boxes, and populates them
with text or pictures and arranges them on one or
multiple pages.
Each item or text
within a box can
be linked to in-
ternal or external
pages, and the
entire le can be
saved as a web-
site, e-book, pdf,
a series of ti or
PNG images. The
software is not
really a substi-
tute for coding
a website either
by hand or using
a WYSIWIG tool
such as Dream-
weaver or Flux,
but it can be
used to create
quick mock-ups
for a designer to
communicate
with a web de-
veloper the appearance and general feel of a pro-
posed website. Similarly, the product can be used to
paste together an eBook to share with a developer.
The software is on sale for $24.99 US and for what it
does, this is a fair price. I was able with no instruction
or manual (none are available at this time) to re-
create the ApplePickers home page for June in about
15 minutes.
In its 1.0.2 beta release there are still some rough
edges on how it works but most apparent capabili-
ties appear to be implemented. For example, words
in a box arranged horizontally, with external links at-
tached to each word did not work, yet when a similar
box was arranged vertically with words separated
with line breaks, the individual links worked correct-
ly. Saving the le, quitting the program and restart-
ing it resolved the problem.
The product excels
at using color
palettes and has
a wide variety of
built in palettes
to choose from.
Color output can
be translated to
CYMK format, but
I’m not sure there
is a rationale for
this because it is
unlikely anyone
would use this
program to output
to a color oset
printer. Neverthe-
less they are there
for the choosing.
In conclusion,
PageMeUp is an
easy to use pro-
gram to quickly as-
semble a complex
document containing text, images, and external links
and to arrange these objects in any way desired. The
output can be used to communicate the appear-
ance of the desired end product, but it is not really a
substitute for creating nished websites or eBooks at
this time.