Earthquake! Earthquake!

The NUK is quite surprising: at first I thought that they do nothing in electronic publishing, but then I received a beta version of the Slovenian bibliography (Monitor V/2, page 129). Then I expected that the bibliography would really be published, but I only awaited the CD about the Ljubljana earthquake. Luckily, quite the right version so I wouldn’t think of it as a new beta doomed to a mysterious sinking.

After the earthquake on the night of April 14-15, 1895, the city council announced a competition for photographers to eternalise the ruins. Wilhelm Helfer even took a folder of large photographs of houses waiting to be demolished and smaller photographs of the post-earthquake Ljubljana. NUK put his photos on CDs, added portraits of two mayors, Hribar and Grasselli, postcards from that time and the next few years, then four more plans and a few pages from the newspapers of the time. So it really is mainly pictorial material, there is not a lot of text, there are a few introductory words and explanations of the pictures. They scanned the material in four sizes and the images on the screen can be enlarged by double-clicking the right button on the mouse (!) – I would never have guessed this crazy combination, I read it in the brief instructions. Like any idiot, I also tried to enlarge the image by double-clicking the left button, as is usual in all other programs. In this program, however, this is a reduction, and because the images are displayed in the smallest form, nothing happens.

The index is divided into two parts. At the top, the names and characteristic colors of each group of pictures are written, and below them in the form of slides, reduced photos are placed. Somehow I thought I was going to go look at the mayor’s photos by clicking the word Mayors, but nothing. I had to roll down the slider and wait for the image to be restored on the screen before I saw Mr. Hribar in a reduced picture and then I enlarged it across the screen. When I got back to the index, I landed at the beginning and not where I left off. Grrr…

Also included is a map and red squares drawn on it, leading you to a photo of that place. Commendable. Word search is built-in, and the authors have also added a drop-down list of all the words you previously searched for. It’s true, though, that a word you choose this way somehow doesn’t convince the search button and it remains gray, so you have to type in at least part of the word to be able to actually search for it. Grrr… And another grr…: at the toolbar at the bottom of the screen there are no real-time explanations of what each button means. You have to open the help option and switch between it and actually using the program for a little bit until you remember what the buttons mean. In the settings you can choose between English and Slovenian and specify the layout of the winged characters. At i-Rose, where they also programmed this NUK CD, they have not forgotten about the old school users this time and added the ASCII 7 layout.

That’s all regarding the programming matters. The CD itself, judging by its content is one of the occasional editions, which are mostly intended for (business?) gifts. This task is filled in by the hundred year anniversary of the earthquake in Ljubljana. The design of the cover and the look of the screen is elegant. Because NUK has taken care of three different packaging forms – a recreation of the original leather box, then a canvas and finally a simpler version – you can give the CDs to your friends without worries, especially those from California and Japan.