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See how SmartMarkers make data come alive. This short movie requires the Flash™ plug-in.

Sometimes, little tools around the office make our daily work lives so much easier it's hard to imagine not having them. The paperclip, for example, or the Post-it® "sticky note." SmartMarkers is like that -- an ingenious PC tool from IBM that makes life easier for anyone who regularly works with data contained in informational and reporting applications, such as sales reporting, research, and quality analysis.

SmartMarkers is an easily customizable component of the IBM VisualAge WebRunner product that gives users a unique visual metaphor based on familiar highlighter pens and other stationary tools used for emphasizing or underlining data on a printout.

"SmartMarkers is a clear example of IBM's efforts to create easy-to-use tools that make computing simpler," says Paul Englefield, project leader for the SmartMarkers project at IBM's Ease of Use group in Warwick, England. "The major issue for us in developing this product was that data analysis tools are effective, but can be difficult and clumsy to use. We wanted to design a utility with direct, intuitive interface that would support a range of visualization techniques in a consistent manner."

A Snap to Use -- and Colorful
SmartMarkers lets you turn a mouse cursor into a virtual highlighter pen or other desktop tool for quickly and easily exploring data.

There are many kinds of markers, each designed for a specific analysis. For example, the Average marker highlights values above and below a mean, while the Trend marker shows positive and negative changes. Use Statistics to highlight variations from a mean, or create your own marker by customizing the general-purpose Custom marker.

"To follow through on the highlighter pen metaphor, we built color into SmartMarkers to show the results of analysis, and a key to explain the meaning of each color," says Englefield. "For example, the Average marker applies red, yellow, and green to mark values below, close to, and above the mean."

Based on the Java development language, SmartMarkers was designed so developers can easily create varieties of SmartMarkers-enabled applications. These applications are based on JavaBeans - Java components that can be integrated with other beans using visual tools such as IBM's VisualAge for Java.

"We think of SmartMarkers as a set of components," says Englefield. "This helps developers who typically create applications by assembling and integrating components from multiple sources and vendors. For example, they might use SmartMarker components together with components from another application needed for selecting data from a database. We've also introduced a new chart bean - small, lightweight charting components that can be used to add live graphs to Web sites and applications.

Filling Up on Java Beans
SmartMarkers 1.0 shipped in the fall of 1998 as a component of IBM VisualAge WebRunner, part of the VisualAge for Java development environment that lets developers with an annual subscription download Java beans from a repository. "This demonstrates another way in which IBM is building powerful, easy tools for both users and developers," says Englefield. "It turns the already-rich VisualAge environment into an even better one."

IBM VisualAge for Java is an award-winning application environment for building Java applications, applets, servlets, and JavaBeans components. There are four editions of VisualAge - Entry, Professional, Enterprise, and E-business - that let developers take advantage of the most up-to-date component-based development and visual programming techniques for Java.

All-in-One Approach
SmartMarkers reflects the guiding philosophy behind VisualAge for Java, and all other IBM products: design intelligent, easy-to-use products that contain all the functionality that users need.



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