ANN: Hinduism Today Digital Edition -- Release Candidate 1.0

[Sivakatirswami]

Aloha and Namaste from Kapaa, Hawaii and Niteroi, Brasil:

We are pleased to announce, thanks to everyone's hard work, Andre  
Garzia's talents and the support of many on this list, the Hinduism  
Today Digital Edition -- "Release Candidate 1.0rc.1"  which just  
means, all known bugs discovered to date have been squashed (we  
hope...) We have been sweating it out here for the last three weeks,  
but it came out well, though we are probably a week or more behind  
schedule.

It's free and we need (begging for!) testers. Go to:

http://www.hinduismtoday.com/digital/

Concept modeled on Dan Shafer's "SmartEbooks" with the addition of a  
few bells and whistles, and a simple, quiet, but hopefully pleasing  
graphic design from our design department, this is a not-so- 
complicated Revolution Remote Client app, PDF downloader, booter and  
back issues manager. An "iMag" for Hinduism Today. Special thanks  
goes to Ken Ray for XML lib and Chipp Walters and Chris at Altuit for  
altSplash, two libs that really make this work.

The web interface,  back end PostGreSQL are all "driven" by  
revolution CGI's. So what you experience from here on out is 100%  
Revolution top to bottom (+xhtml+PostGreSql+Apache) (Dan is this   
what you mean by a "web app" ??-- if any one wants to the answer to  
"how did you do that?" contact me off list)

Our call to testers is: "Hammer on it has hard as you want, break it  
if you can!"

Also, everyone is hereby given an "open season license" to send in as  
much constructive criticism as you feel inspired to (or not). In the  
"Help" section, scroll down and use the link that says "Click here to  
send a support Request" (this is deliberately buried, in the UI...  
though we might change that later)

In the "About" section scroll all the way to the end to see  
Revolution and Revolutionary credits. These links run through a  
referrals CGI on our server and I am logging them all to see what  
kind of traffic-interest we might get from the large Indian-Hindu  
software community that will be downloading this app. Since it is  
free, this product is a walking, talking advertisement for Revolution  
for those with any interest in the technology behind sit.

Be forewarned, this is a broadband product... at 25-28 megabytes of  
PDFs per issue. It will be very interesting to see how hungry people  
are for this kind of offering vs how much resistance there will be to  
downloading that much data.

We hope you enjoy our new application: (code name "Brasil") and of  
course, the Digital Edition itself: the beautiful PDF's of the April  
issue of Hinduism Today International Magazine.

Om shanti (peace)

Sivakatirswami, Kauai
Andre, Brasil
Sadhunathan Nadesan, San Diego

p.s. we discovered an obscure issue with Apple's installer: if you  
have recent permissions issues on your applications folder, the  
reproducable bug is: the installer does not write any application to  
disk. Run "Disk Utilities" and fix permissions and it works fine. I  
don't  know if there are or can be, similar issues on Windows or not.