A lot of CD-ROM publishers are simply dumping words and images onto disc. Most video clips are worse than useless. Xiphias is one of the few companies that is looking seriously at ways to make CD-ROM useful and to take advantage of its abilities.
How the World Works, an ambitious title for a brief history of civilization, and How Things Work, "a light-hearted video tour through the history of human ingenuity from carburetors to carbon fiber," are fun to cruise and edifying to parents as well as children.
Xiphias has imaginatively repackaged data on these CD-ROMs of encyclopedic information. A grid-like "Matrix system" provides three different roads to knowledge, if not necessarily wisdom: Author's Path, POV or Random. The first moves you through the cells of the matrix, leaving a "trail" to mark your path.
The second allows you to take a chronological slice that pivots off geographical point and to look at history as it happened - on the ground around the pyramids, for instance, from Cheops to Sadat. The third - my favorite - in effect shuffles the cards until you pick one: the Battle of Cambrai, or McGuffey's Reader, say.
But with its QuickTime implementations, the Matrix system taxes slower machines. While the idea of a common interface for a series of volumes is admirable, I'm not so sure it works as well on Kathy Smith's Fat Burning System as on history. (Does your laptop have a CD-ROM so you can take this disc to the exercise mat?) And why can't all CD-ROM designers install a simple control menu with Exit and Return to top menu options constantly on screen, as even children's games do?
How the World Works, How Things Work: US$39.95. Kathy Smith's Fat Burning System: US$69.95. Compton's New Media: (800) 862 2206, +1 (619) 929 2500.
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