Softmagic announced today at Macworld San Francisco that it’s begun shipping Project-M Lite. Built atop Mac OS X, Project-M Lite is a “Publish Different” desktop publishing solution that sports features such as a scalable objective-oriented environment and industry standard PDF imaging model, thanks to Quartz.
Quartz is the graphics engine of Mac OS X and is based on Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) a superset of PostScript.) Project-M Lite is designed to offer “an intuitive and user-friendly cross-media publishing solution consisting of a XML editor and an interactive and automated page layout application that understands the concept of separation of content and design based on XML,” Fred Scherrer, Softmagic’s director of business development, told MacCentral.
M-Layout is the multilingual, intuitive, XML-based page layout program. Available immediately in the US, it has a suggested retail price of US$599. SendStory is Softmagic’s multilingual XML editor for the Mac OS X that allows data to be purposed for both print and the Web. SendStory has a suggested retail price of $249. The Project-M Lite bundle, which includes both of these products, is being offered at an introductory price of $349 that will remain in effect through March 31.
SendStory communicates with Apple’s online file sharing facility, iDisk, and any TCP/IP networked server to send and receive the structured XML story that conforms to the industry standard DTDs or to the customized DTDs designed with SendStory. Its way of synchronizing the document structures of the multilingual documents is designed to make it an easy choice for any international company dealing with the documents in many languages.
SendStory also converts XML to HTML based on the pre-defined style mapping mechanism, making it a useful tool for writing Apple Help files and Web pages. A structured XML story created with SendStory can be interfaced to a content management system for re-purposing of the data.
Project-M Lite is a Cocoa-based solution. (Cocoa is Apple’ advanced object-oriented programming environment.) In developing the solution, Softmagic considered “the multitude of advantages that Apple’s new OS X brings to the market,” according to Min Soo Kim, Softmagic’s President and CEO
For a complete description of M-Layout and SendStory, and the complete Project-M XML/PDF based workflow application for magazines, please visit Softmagic’s Web site.