Flip page
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Flip page refers to the effect of flipping through the pages of a digital document as if it was a physical document. A flip page application is often made in Adobe Flash and requires the Adobe Flash Player to run in a browser window. The benefit of having a flip page document is that it affords the user experience of reading an actual copy of a physical document or magazine. The technology is commonly used by traditional publishers that want to create (and spread) a digital version of their physical document/paper/magazine.
The illusion of having a tangible document on your computer is supposedly more powerful with the flip page function since it mimics the natural way of browsing through a physical document, yet at the same time allows the user to use the traditional electronic benefits like searching through a document, jumping to a certain page, links to external websites etc.
[edit] History
In May 2002 Tony Hogqvist from the company Perfect Fools[1] was one of the first to combined masking, skewing and alpha gradients effects in Flash to simulate a page "curl" effect so it appeared that the image actually curled as the page was turned.
In July 2002 Sean O'Shell of PixelWit.com[2] won an open source contest[3] on ActionScript.org[4] with his free open source PageFlip software[5].
Mid 2004, Iparigrafika[6] added a brand new feature in their flip page application, allowing the users to tear away pages and they reintroduced transparent pages which originally had been featured in the Perfect Fools' application.[7]
Today (2008) Iparigrafika's open source software is still available, but most publishers turn to companies like Pagegangster[8] or client based software like eBookCreator[9] to convert their documents into flip page applications, due to their easy 'pdf to flash converter' that makes the document Google search engine friendly.
When talking about flip page, it's necessary to mention FlippingBook[10] team. FlippingBook premium page flip engine is known since 2004, and now (2008) it is one of the most popular commercial software in the market. Generally it is being used by Adobe Flash developers (thanks to FlippingBook flash component[11]) and Joomla developers (thanks to FlippingBook Joomla Gallery Component[12]).
