iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated

While Tribeworks' iShell 3 is a pretty gawrsh-durned excellent multimedia authoring program, chances are that you're not going to be able to head on down to your local Mega-Giganto Book Emporium And International House of Double-Caffeinated-Half-Caff-Lattes and find any supplemental iShell training books. At the same time, said establishment probably has devoted more square footage than most of us live in just to books on Director alone. However, author Jan Costenbader of Electric Tours has stepped up to provide two iShell resources that could very well be all the extra iShell reference most of us may ever need. Which is a good thing, since iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated pretty much make up the entire market.

Fair or not, I approach all computer books these days with a healthy amount of skepticism. After all, I lovingly and painstakingly cultivated my inherent distrust of computer books over several years in my early twenties and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars spent on flashy software books before I ultimately realized that a good many of them, for lack of a better word, suck. So my criteria with any supplemental software training, printed or otherwise, comes down to a simple question: would I buy this? In the case of both iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated, the answer is a resounding yes.

iShell 3 In Depth—the title does not lie

The first thing that struck me about iShell 3 In Depth is just how stinking thorough it is. ("Stinking" is a complement here, incidentally.) Whether you're completely new to iShell or coming from version 2, iShell 3 In Depth has a lot to offer for a variety of experience levels. This is as close to being an "all things to all people" manual as I have ever seen. The book is extremely well-organized, starting out with an extended look at what's new to iShell 3 and progressing through topics ranging from initial installation all the way through project distribution. The other great thing I found about iShell 3 In Depth is the way it's organized. It's a pretty effective combination of straight-up reference and project-based tutorials that flow together quite nicely. I've seen a lot of books that try to combine the two, and many of them don't do either very well. iShell 3 In Depth accomplishes this amalgam of content pretty effortlessly.

In a nutshell, iShell 3 In Depth is organized from easy to hard. It starts off with a couple of beginning tutorials that introduce the reader to iShell's workflow. It then moves on to a look at everything, and I do mean everything, that iShell packs into its interface, progressing through the program in the way iShell itself is actually set up (elements, events, and commands). It then dishes out some advanced tutorials, then on to a review of the higher level features iShell sports, and finally wraps up with how to prepare your finished projects for distribution.

The ultimate advantage to the organization of iShell 3 In Depth is that the end result is a reference that is simultaneously linear and non-linear. If you were to blow through each of the 566 pages in order, you'd find that it serves up reference material and examples at just the right time, making it an excellent way to learn iShell 3 from scratch. You can also just turn to any of the reference sections and look up whatever it is that needs looking up, so iShell 3 In Depth also delivers for seasoned iShell developers in the market for more of an on-demand reference.

The only gripe I have about iShell 3 In Depth, and it's a small one after some introspection, is the packaging. iShell 3 In Depth comes as a stack of 566 pages in loose-leaf format (and a CD with the tutorial assets), along with a standard three-ring binder to put it all in, a process that briefly got me reminiscing about the mid-1980's and the annual night-before-the-first-day-of-school supply shopping. But I digress. The packaging irked me somewhat at first, because at $79 bones, I would have expected a little more. However, it bothered me less and less over time because of how iShell 3 In Depth is set up. It's designed to be, for lack of a better phrase, a "living document." When you purchase iShell 3 In Depth, you get one year of quarterly updates to the manual in PDF format, meaning that you can print off new material and place it yourself inline with the original content. Or, you can do some quick-and-dirty editing yourself and turn iShell 3 In Depth into the reference that you need it to be. Toss out the tutorials, and keep the feature-by-feature reference, or vice versa. So what struck me as kind of cheap-n-cheezey approach at first slowly evolved into being a very natural way to deliver a training manual.

iShell 3 Illustrated—complete project deconstruction

The second half of our iShell reference dynamic duo is iShell 3 Illustrated, which documents the production of an actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness CD ROM title and how it was created, step-by-step, using iShell 2 and 3.

The first interesting thing to note is that while iShell 3 Illustrated is technically a "book," it is delivered entirely on CD ROM with no pre-printed material. Everything in the manual is electronic and is more or less designed to remain so, as the PDF file that constitutes the written portion of the reference embeds interactive material such as QuickTime movies inline along with the written material. Depending on your point of view, this is a love-it-or-hate-it decision. Personally, I don't mind, as I've gotten used to reading a great many things entirely on-screen using Adobe Reader, and I really like having instant access to the inline movies and such. But I realize that for many of you, there's nothing quite as satisfying as a ten-pound lump of dead tree on your lap (insert joke to taste here), so to each their own. And hey, if you don't mind printing out all 530 pages on your home or office printer, more power to you.

The CD ROM title in question—a United States Naval Academy informational program aimed at prospective cadets and parents—isn't representative of what I would call the most exciting subject matter in the world, but it does pack a lot of features that serve to show off the full range of what iShell 3 is capable of, and as such, it makes for a great case study. Everything from producing simple buttons to displaying video and slideshows to interacting with QTVR panoramas is covered in painstaking detail, and at every step along the way you get progress updates of where the collective "we" are in the project, as well as what could only be called the "philosophy" of what's being done at each point and why. Again, like iShell 3 In Depth, iShell 3 Illustrated is incredibly thorough, containing at some points almost too much information about every minute production detail.

As a straight-up iShell reference, I found iShell 3 Illustrated is likely to appeal to a much narrower audience than iShell 3 In Depth, which will probably limit its usefulness to some folks. For new iShell users, who may be coming over from Director or another authoring product, iShell 3 Illustrated is a gold mine of extremely useful information, inasmuch as it reads almost like a translation dictionary from your previous multimedia authoring program to the iShell way of working. Being the veteran of numerous CD ROM productions myself, and having used Director for a great many of them, iShell 3 Illustrated made it very easy for me to grasp how iShell does things as compared to Director. On the flip side, however, I strongly suspect that veteran iShell folk probably won't take too much away from iShell 3 Illustrated that they don't already know, so if you're not an iShell newbie then iShell 3 Illustrated may not be very useful as a training tool as iShell 3 In Depth is likely to be.

However, I did find that iShell 3 Illustrated serves another purpose that should have very wide appeal indeed. In addition to all the iShell-specific material that one would expect from a reference that includes "iShell" in the title, I found iShell 3 Illustrated to also be a pretty decent general study in approaching any interactive project, iShell-based or not. In addition to detailing initial conversations with the client about the project, there is also a lot of good information on how to target minimum system requirements, testing methodology, etc. In fact, there's some excellent generic info that spans the entire production process (preproduction, content gathering, general production, testing, and deployment), so it may be worthwhile to consider iShell 3 Illustrated for what it gives you as a "best practices" document for interactive production. It's also one hell of an advertisement for Electric Tours, which produced the CD and wrote the book, but I doubt many would purchase iShell 3 Illustrated solely based on that.

The bottom line

While the bad news may be that there aren't a whole lot of options out there for do-it-yourself iShell training, the good news is that iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated are both excellent references and are definitely worth a look. Both are available now directly from the Tribeworks web site, with iShell 3 In Depth running $79, and iShell 3 Illustrated priced at $99. However, as of this writing, Tribeworks is offering a package deal on both volumes for $99, which makes the offer kind of hard to pass up.

Filed under: Review on June 9th, 2003

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