Despite the viable promise of Scalar, there remain in this program some limitations and shortcomings that need to be taken into account. I asked Erik Loyer, the Creative Director of the Scalar Development Team and whom I met during my trip to USC, what he thought were Scalar’s current limits, so this discussion is mostly informed by his insights:

• At the present moment, the people at Scalar would like to enhance how the Scalar program manages large numbers of media files. As I learned myself, Scalar, for example, can only upload media files of less than 2 MB, so this restriction already can be seen as a disadvantage for projects that want to showcase a sizable amount of media material. Loyer informed me that the Scalar developers are collaborating with the “Media Ecology Project” to produce a tool that could gather and access media from a variety of internet sources.
• Regarding the video uploads, since our videos, if you recall, are over 2 MB, then I would have to upload them to another site like YouTube or Vimeo. If these videos contain people who are not journal authors, we would have to inform them that they would be viewable on these public sites as well as on our journal, and we would need to secure their consent and approval. If I were to make the uploaded videos private, that is, unviewable or invisible to the public, on a site like YouTube, these videos still would not be viewable in our Scalar journal, so these videos have to be publicly accessible. We could try reducing the size of our videos and audio to less than 2 MB or cutting them up into smaller segments and not have to worry about uploading the videos to another site, though I at the moment do not know how to do this.
• Another limitation is that when it comes to designing the page backgrounds or the aesthetic style of the Scalar pages, users can only access a very limited assortment of designs. We'd indeed have to hire a web designer if we want a very attractive and advanced design frame. The appendix has links to some Scalar books that have been specially designed.
  
• The annotation and editing tools, Loyer indicates, have yet to be fully upgraded, and Scalar does not have any bookmarks, highlights, and other markup features for book readers. The developers hope to add these upgrades and markup features by both improving Scalar’s programming and using third-party tools.
• The developers are also seeking to improve the operability of Scalar projects that have large numbers of items. Loyer specified that by “large number” he meant “several thousand.” I doubt our Scalar journal will have several thousand items, so I don’t think this issue should be a concern for us.

These are the current limitations of Scalar. They to me do not seem to be much cause for concern, as the current features of Scalar I already talked about can make our journal just as conceptually complex and attractive. Though you might have other ideas.

This page is a tag of:

Comment on this page