NeoBook Professional for Windows is a terrific application that allows you to create multimedia books or presentations that will run on Windows machines. The software is easy to install and even easier to use. Almost everything is point and click or drag and drop. You can test your book/project while you are working on it quickly and easily. I had a hard time closing the software to write this review. I didn't have to learn any programming at all. I read the manual of course, like we always do when we get new software. It's not one of those huge technical manuals that has you confused before you get to the second page. It is easy to read and you can apply what you learn immediately. There is a tutorial in the manual if you want to jump in and start creating something right away. You are not going to believe how really easy it is!

With NeoBook Professional you can create many different types of e-publications including training materials, tests, and portfolios. You can also communicate with other software. You can assign certain attributes to a "master page" that will also apply to all the pages in your publication. You can import images, text files, etc., into your publication.

You can link to your favorite text, image, and sound editing tools from the preferences menu to make editing those files quick and easy.

Above is the main interface for NeoBook Professional. You choose the dimensional size of your publication and the screen resolution for viewing. At the bottom of the interface you can keep track of your pages and what page you are currently editing.

The page attributes dialog allows you to set up how your pages will look throughout your publication. You can choose to have all the pages set up the same or you can set each page up differently.

The image above and the one below belong to the same dialog. Creating a button is as simple as clicking on the button icon on the tools menu and dragging a shape for your button. When you do that the Button dialog comes up and you type in the text you want on your button and then choose an action for your button. Below is a portion of the button actions dialog. You are not limited to one action per button either. You can have multiple actions. It's easy to keep track of your actions in the Button Actions dialog.

You don't have to use the button tool to create a button. As you will see in my final example below, sometimes gray rectangular buttons just don't cut it for a graphical presentation. You can create your own buttons and apply hot spots to them. You can also assign actions to pages.

The tools menu is self explanatory except that you can't see the extras included from the above screen shot. You can choose your fill color and apply a pattern to it. There are many fill patterns included that can be applied to selections, whether they be buttons, shapes, or text areas.

You can also add sounds and animation to your publications. Included in the NeoBook Professional software is a utility called NeoToon. NeoToon allows you to create a single animation file from a series of images created in your favorite image editor. NeoToon itself is not an image editor.

Looks like a real program doesn't it? It is a real program!

Created in just minutes!

You can run the publication at any time during creation by simply choosing run from the book menu. Your application comes up and you can move through it just as though it were already compiled and installed on your system.

You can compile your project for distribution on other machines, and those machines do not have to have a copy of NeoBook Professional on them to run. Depending on the size of your publication you can distribute it on floppies or CD. If you choose to distribute it on floppies and the project is too large for one floppy, the compile utility will handle splitting it for you. If it is not too large, you can even make it available for download from the Internet.

NeoBook Professional is so easy to use you can spend your time on the content of your publication and not on programming. Once you finish your project, you can compile it into a stand alone application for distribution.

For those who like to write scripts, don't despair! NeoBook Professional provides a scripting language for you to use also.

NeoBook Professional is a very powerful authoring tool. To make it even more powerful, there are add-ons available on the NeoSoftware site to make creating your publications even easier and more versatile.

If you are planning on creating applications/e-publications I suggest you visit NeoSoftware and download the trial demo today. Try it out and see just how easy and fun it is to use. Eat your dinner, put the kids to bed, and plan on spending some time playing with this software! Once you open it and see just how easy it is to use you won't want to stop playing. Don't let the ease of use fool you though, this is very powerful software.

Here's a recap of some of the projects you can create with NeoBook Professional:

• Computer-Based Training
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• Educational Materials
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• Multimedia Newsletters
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• Reports and Presentations
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• Sales Tracts and Catalogs
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• Reference Materials
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• Electronic Magazines
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• Illustrated Interactive Books
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• Promotional Material
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• Interactive Kiosk Displays
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• Advertising
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• Custom Screen Savers
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• and much more...

NeoBook Professional Supported File Types:

• Imports ASCII/ANSI and Rich Text (RTF).
• Image file formats may also be imported, including JPEG, BMP, PCX, GIF, PNG, WMF, etc.
• Supports True Type fonts.
• Plays AVI, WAV, MIDI, FLI, FLC, CAR and other multimedia formats.

NeoSoftware Web Site

Estimated Street Price
$199.95 (US) Average Selling Price
$79.95 (US) Upgrade
$149.95 (US) Competitive Upgrade

Windows System Requirements
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0/5.0
10MB Free HD space for installation

Copyright Vikki Olds, All Rights Reserved