Today, Thursday, September 16, 2004 marks our official start to the beta release of Qumana.
Qumana is a microcontent assembly and publishing application that features three integrated capabilities that are extremely useful to all people who create and author content for publication to blogs, web sites, email, and documents.
Capability # 1 … Drag n’ Drop
Qumana uses sophisticated drag n’ drop capabilities, along with a funky and easy-to-use DropPad that sits on your browser in an extremely inobtrusive manner … the DropPad is essentially transparent (thanks for this nifty little feature, Graham). A user can surf and research all day long, or for whatever period of time they wish, dragging and dropping any and all content they find interesting or useful into the DropPad. users can also drag n’ drop links, files, large blocks of text, pictures, audio and video files … almost anything.
Capability # 2 … Assemble, Shape, Edit
Then, the user can open up the Workpad and see what they’ve collected, move it around, re-arrange it, delete what is no longer interesting or relevant, and so on. Then, either Save the content as a Folder in the Library, to be worked upon later, or click on Publish …. to create a post or a document while in the flow of working on an idea and its expression.
Up comes a full-featured WYSIWYG html Editor, so that the user can add text, change fonts, add links, upload filesto finish things off so that what will be published looks professional (well, it looks however you, the user, wants it to look, within the full range of WYSIWYG capabilities). And, there’s Spell-check !
Additionally, right-clicking on any item and scrolling down to and clicking on Properties allows the user to create a significant range of both structured and user-defined metadata (key words, categories, comments, etc.)
Capability # 3 … Post-to-“Anywhere”
If the user is blogging, the stitched-together final-edit content is posted to whatever blog you’ve directed the application to publish to. You can have one, two or many different blog settings loaded in, so that you can post the content, or parts of it, to multiple blogs.
Currently, the user can also Save the content that is being kept to HTML or to RTF … in either case, the content can be opened up in MS Word and can then be saved and/or printed as a Word document. Post to email and Save as PDF are on the itinerary for the next few weeks.
We welcome serious beta testers who will put the application thorugh it’s paces, applying the “use it, abuse it, see if we don’t wan to lose it” methodology … try to break it, tell us what could function more smoothly, or help us understand features that we haven’t yet designed and built that will make this one kick-ass product !
The download is over at www.qumana.com
Welcome to the beta release of Qumana …. keeping you posted by thinking and linking at the speed of reading
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