CD-Title design is an aesthetic matter more than a technical one in these days. The computer technologies developed today on both sides of hardware and software have made CD-Title design easier compared to the era of DOS. With the assistance of multimedia functions, high-performance PCs and data storage advances, developers need not take pains to adapt themselves to the limited computer capabilities any more. We now could design more pragmatic and fanciful electronic books that may store immense amount of data and could offer users integrated and interactive environments to earn knowledge. Therefore, what we are going to discuss about CD-Title making in this article is not mainly concerned with the technical problems. Though there are inevitably some but emphasizes on the collection and organization of the content that contributes to the abundance of our product and on the human computer interface design that contributes to the creativity.

With the real experience on making a commercial CD-Title, we would like to share this implementation experience in this article as well as the analyses of creativity and abundance considerations.

The CD-Title “The Regimens for Healthy Life” is designed by our 9-member group leaded by Prof. FeiPei Lai, Mr. Tsai, and Dr. Kuo who is an M.D. The motivation of our work is to fuse many publications of Dr. Kuo’s into one CD to offer friendly multimedia learning circumstances and to provide substantial, complete and well-structured information for people who would like to keep healthy through life. At the first stage of our work, most efforts are made on the data collection and organization because the data are from many books, videotapes and unpublished notes. It is a rather difficult and tedious job to structure them. In addition, all of our group members but Dr. Kuo has only computer science backgrounds. So before creating the hierarchy of the data we have to get the ideas of the regimens ourselves and then we could consider the hierarchy not only from the point of view of a computer engineer but also from that of an advocator of the regimens. We did not do any real programming work before the hierarchy of the data is acknowledged. In fact, we did write some programs then but they are of no use because we can not build a castle in the air. Only when the stratum of the data is assured, programming work make sense.

The question comes in how to construct the hierarchy of the sophisticated data. The data in our CD include videos, images and texts and the content of the raw data is rather promiscuous. First of all, we have to digitize all the stuff. We have to transfer the videos from tapes into digital files and sometimes take them again if necessary. The texts not digitized have to be keyed in manually. Furthermore, because of the huge size of the video files, their total playing time allowed in our CD is limited. The cutting job of the video files is therefore another hassling work. When we complete all the labor tasks, what to do next is to establish a structure to accommodate the data. The strategy we apply to construct the structure is guessing intuitively and then making adjustment conditionally. We students proposed the hierarchy according to our programming experience and the material we collect first. Then Dr. Kuo, Mr. Tsai and Prof. Lai give us instructions. We discussed the details through and try to incur flexibility in our design that we could add or omit the data and functions more easily. We figured out the functions and interface our system could achieve and test them by writing several small computer programs at the same time. The test programs let us confirm the feasibility of the hierarchy. We revised our hierarchy every time after discussions or program tests. Hierarchy construction takes more than half of our design time and its importance is never over emphasized. Hierarchy construction is the foundation or infrastructure of a CD-Title making and determines the abundance of the product.

After the well-structured data and functions for presenting the data are established, we have finished the script of our CD-Title design. We could start writing programs to implement our system. The computer programs offer the integrated interface for users to access our system. We try to make our interface dazzling and friendly so we collaborate with the art design studio that they could provide our CD-Title beautiful pictures. The implementation process is that we programmers told the art designers what kind of illustrators we want and then when the illustrators are finished, we apply them to our programs. Dr. Kuo would make some comments on the interface and correct some conceptual peccadilloes about the regimens. Moreover, because Dr. Kuo had no ideas about the computers before, his comments could reflect the voice of a computer novice. We hope that this CD-Title could be easy to use for most people so it is important to ask for the computer beginners’ advice. On the other hand, even though we have completed the script of our CD-Title, we still need to make some innovations on our interface to make it friendly and attractive. Creativity therefore plays an important role. It is difficult to analyze where the creativity comes from. In our design, the creativity comes from the problems we encountered in how to overcome the gap between the limited development tools and desired interfaces. All of our members talk all the technical and conceptual matters through and get new ideas and solutions all the time. We believe that creative ideas need time and every member’s brainstorming to gestate. Creativity serves as an essential part of our design to provide users amiable circumstances to learn how to be healthy through life. We consider that everything fantastic should include some factor of creativity to provide different perspectives to the world and try our best to accomplish this in our work.

With the creative interface on the front end and abundant data resources underlying the interface, we are rather confident in the quality of our CD-Title. Of course there are always some technical problems in CD-Title design. For example, we should take the performance of normal PCs into considerations to guarantee our program is not exhausting to the system with multimedia functions or to solve the problem about display resolution of our program. However, we do not talk about the technical problems in detail because every development tool has its own limitations and the advances in technology could crack most of the technical problems in the near future. The spirit of the CD-Title is like the spirit of a book that content is the key and since the CD-Title design usually needs the cooperation of computer programmers and professionals in other fields, it takes more efforts than other styles of publications. Actually, when we investigated the market conditions in CD-Title design at the beginning of our project, we found that most of the domestic products are not so good that they are either like the creations of computer programmers with superficial content in their design or are with ugly and not user-friendly interfaces. We are lucky that Dr. Kuo is the authority in his field and we programmers have try our best to understand the regimens, structure the huge amount of data and create the interface with enthusiasm. The cost of our CD-Title design might inevitably higher than that of others but we believe the quality is the only niche in the technologically mature market of CD-Title design.

Finally, we conclude that CD-Title design is like writing a book more than writing computer programs. It does need a lot of programming work but just as typing is not the main point in writing good articles, programming is not the major concern in CD-Title design. The abundance of data and the creativity in the presentation of the data are fundamentals of making a marvelous CD-Title. We wish that in the future there would be more mature domestic products on the market though it still needs a long way to go.