THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 12, 1995 TAG: 9506100047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM BOYER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
AN AMBITIOUS NEW software program is trying to turn the home computer into the family hearth.
Echo Lake, from Delrina, is designed to organize your memories the way Quicken keeps track of family finances.
It's one of the most beautifully designed computer programs I've ever seen. Sepia tone and wood grain are everywhere. The program plunks you down in an imaginary log cabin in the woods.
Steam wafts from a hot cup of coffee. There are bookshelf ornaments to play with. Shake one water-filled souvenir and snow falls faintly over your screen.
Click on the coffee and you're transported to a room with a breathtaking view of a quiet cyber-lake with a snow-capped mountain in the background. Virtual hawks fly by. A woodpecker works his way up a dead tree. A squirrel pokes his head in the pane of glass, curious.
Now that you're in the mood, the real work begins. You're here to write your diary or keep a family scrapbook.
Echo Lake contains full multimedia support. That means you can add voice clips and sound effects, scanned images and photos, even electronic video files. The program handles the Kodak Photo CD program, in which you send your film away and get a CD-ROM with the photos in electronic form.
Stuck for something to write? No problem. Just click on a little red button for inspiration, and Echo Lake prompts you with questions, famous newspaper headlines, anything to get the memories flowing.
``Is there a story surrounding your given name? Do your children have boyfriends or girlfriends? Did you ever solve the Rubik's Cube?''
When you're done, you store your story in a book that you can search by keyword later. The stories are organized chronologically in tree rings, with the oldest memories at the center.
This might be the warmest, fuzziest piece of software released yet. But it has limitations.
But where do you stick the baby hair, the ticket stubs, your daughter's first four-leaf clover? You can scan them in and store their electronic image, but it's not the same. And I hate to think about losing the family memories to a hard-disk crash.
Echo Lake is list-priced at $49 ($10 more for a CD-ROM version), and is available for PCs running Microsoft Windows. The company promises a MacIntosh version within a few months. The best of the Gateway columns are available on the Computer Page of the Pilot Online. See Page A2 for details. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by Moyoya Nakamura Click on the coffee in the Echo Lake
main screen, and you go to a window of your imaginary cabin where
contemplate mountains, water ane wildlife while you overcome your
writer's block.
by CNB