Newspaper on the move

I had rushed to the airport to pick up Andy. There was urgency in his voice and I did not know why. He was on his way back from England after covering the Ashes. Andy works with USA Today and covers International Sport. I had carried my laptop as he had requested me to. The moment I reached the airport, Andy stormed into the car. All he told me was to drive him straight to his office. This meant a good one and half hour drive from the airport.

He picked up my laptop and plugged in his PDA and while doing this he told me his laptop had crashed. When I enquired about his stress he went on to tell me one of the world’s best cricketers living in the US died and he needed to file an Obituary for tomorrow’s edition. It was almost 3 PM and with my limited understanding I knew he had to file in his report earliest by 4.30 PM to catch the morning edition.

I knew his PDA was loaded with Apps-D and it was a mobile office by itself. It was amazing to watch how he managed to open his personal laptop files using the PDA. Already having a few websites that had information of this cricketer, he dragged all the information on to the laptop, opened his Outlook extracted some info and opened QuarkExpress which was also loaded on his PDA.

I kept driving and there was silence from his end as he was really busy trying to finish the story. I noticed he had finished editing the story in Microsoft Word and transferred all the files onto QuarkExpress. He called the Chief Editor, queried about the space allotted for the article and he got down to creating the layout which was ready in less than 20 minutes. Opening his mail again, he made a .tif file and mailed it off to his editor.

I asked him how many files he could store on his PDA. He mentioned Apps-D requires a minimum of 128 MB space inclusive of the applications. As we were driving, his editor called and told him to check his mail. He checked his mail and there was a PDF of the complete page layout. I peered into his screen and I got a sneak preview of tomorrow’s Sports Page.

I told him “so I can surprise my wife by showing her tomorrow’s newspaper layout today?” Andy frowned, saying “Hello…! You are not going to do anything like that…what makes you think the layout is stored on your system? Please understand, Apps-D does not leave any traces on the host machine, nor does it cache private information in the host's browser history.” I was kidding but I was kicked to see the next day’s newspaper being created on my laptop and of course using my favorite Apps-D.