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Deep down, you know, we're still apes. Oh sure, we can do abstract thought, math, Mozart. Still, if you want someone to grasp something complex, draw him a picture. Better yet, make it three-dimensional. Best of all, animate it; give the simian digits sticking out of those business suits a chance to pretend that they're fiddling with it directly.
 

[click for larger image] Anark Studio lets you turn 3D models into dynamic, interactive applications.

Anark Corp. wants to put the tools to do that in your simian digits. Version 3.0 of its Anark Studio lets you turn 3D models into dynamic, interactive applications. You can build the geometry in Studio, or import it from a variety of formats. Then you can build interactive presentations where you control lighting,

cameras and visibility of the model's various parts. Slather on text and video (mapped onto the model objects, if you like), and do keyframe animation of the whole works (you can animate based on any numerical property in the model). Drag and drop buttons or menus into the presentation that lead to the logic you build with Anark's action/event/property tools. The whole thing plays on a free client program (Windows or Mac) that will leverage 3D accelerators if present, or render the result in software if not. Or, if you prefer, use the company's software development kit to embed its ActiveX client in your application. Anark Studio costs $3,499.

Anark Corp., 1500 Pearl St. Ste. 300, Boulder, CO 80302, Tel: (303) 545-2592, Fax: (303) 545-2575, www.anark.com —Rick Wayne

Angle Brackets Do Not an Application Make

Repeat after me: "XML is not magic fairy dust!" Good, now try to get marketing to say it. No luck? Here, beat them over the head with David Megginson's book Imperfect XML (Addison-Wesley, 2005). Megginson doesn't try to explain XML, thank goodness. (How many feet of bookshelf must we devote to that?) Instead, his "rants, raves, tips and tricks from an insider" identify some key decision points and risks for developers contemplating an XML application. "XML is still surprisingly difficult to use," he notes. "If I want to send someone a collection of data ... the recipient will be able to use the information far more easily if I encode it in comma-delimited text or Microsoft's proprietary Excel format than in XML." Heretically enough, he's even willing to list disadvantages to XML for documents and data! Don't get me wrong—Megginson is an XML advocate, just a thoughtful one.

 

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He discusses specifications, how to plan the application, searching, converting to and from legacy formats, and performance (always a sensitive topic among XML-heads). Not an enormous book at 202 pages, Imperfect XML sticks to the joys and sorrows of building applications in the real world, leaving the hype-meisters to prate unheeded. The book costs $39.99.—RW

She Needed His Help (and So Do We)

Security expert Tom Patterson's Mapping Security (Symantec Press, 2005) is a wake-up call to provincial U.S. IT staffers. In it, the author offers a series of object lessons in culture shock and local customs, and how they impact security concerns. He was working in Frankfurt, for example, when his administrative assistant walked in. "I want to get pregnant," she told him, "and I need your help." It so happened that she and her boyfriend wanted a month away at a spa to relax so that they could conceive; the culture-shock part is that in Germany, the company was expected—nay, required—to provide paid leave to accomplish the mission. Companies who don't understand and accommodate such differences won't know where to start when developing security policies. It's hard enough to get people to adhere to such policies; imagine compliance levels if you're perceived as an insensitive outsider. Patterson distills his experience in 30-odd countries into recommendations and resources for companies with a global IT reach. Mapping Security ends with a bibliography of hundreds of security resources, listed country-by-country. You can pick it up for $34.99 (in U.S. dollars, that is). —RW

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Mirror, Mirror, On the Net...

Developers make lousy testers. Your familiarity with the application domain, coupled with your knowledge of the application itself, serves as blinders that shut off whole avenues of confusion, wrong input and inappropriate mental models. But you can always count on your customers to flounder when they should be flying or click "Reset" when they mean "Help." (Not that your deployed Web apps ever contain bugs, either.)
 

But you can't hear your users cursing. If you're lucky, for every 200 irate browser-pounders, one will call customer service. If you're very lucky, one in 50 of those will remember what he was trying to do. If you find the one out of 10 of those who can describe in detail how things went sour, and the service representative conveys all the information to you, the developer, run, not walk, to the nearest lottery outlet and buy a ticket.
 

[click for larger image] RealiTea tracks what your users are doing, so you can monitor your Web application's health.

You know those help lines that tell you your experience may be recorded to improve service? What if you could do the same thing for your Web application's users? TeaLeaf's RealiTea is a QA package that grabs what your users do—and see—as they do it. But it's not just a tool for looking over the users' shoulders. RealiTea also collects statistics on completions and can send alerts when things go wrong, so that you can monitor the health of critical applications over time and replay the user sessions that went awry. Part hardware and part application, RealiTea uses a box on the network to sniff the HTTP traffic, then records the data for analysis; subsequently, you can search for sessions in a variety of ways, then fold, spindle and take apart the ones that didn't work. The use of a passive sniffer ensures that you don't have to change your application to use RealiTea. Performance is also unaffected, since the sniffer works in parallel, rather than in the middle of the transactions.

TeaLeaf has paid close attention to security and privacy: Communications are encrypted, and access to customer sessions leaves an audit trail. Optionally, you can filter or destroy sensitive information.

RealiTea pricing depends on the application, starting at around $75,000.

TeaLeaf Technology Inc., 45 Fremont St., Ste. 1450, San Francisco, CA 94105, Tel: (415) 932-5000, Fax: (415) 495-8018, www.tealeaf.com —RW

New & Noteworthy Editor Rick Wayne has way too much fun with Web-enabled ecosystem management software for the University of Wisconsin. E-mail him at fewayne@facstaff.wisc.edu.

Software Development does not review New & Noteworthy inclusions. The features, capabilities and, in some cases, the images have been derived from the manufacturers' information. The words, however, are all ours. New product announcements may be sent to newandnoteworthy@cmp.com.

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