Instead, look at (and listen to!) this knowledge app: Here’s the way it might appear traditionally (image courtesy of NASA). In other words, I would like to explain a particular case of the Doppler effect.

(Actually we’re also improving what I call the “density of information” too: the ability to pack understandable information into a small space-particularly important on small screen devices like smartphones.)Īs a simple example of all of this, let’s say I want to communicate how the sound of an emergency vehicle changes as it passes by me. With CDFs we’re broadening this communication pipe with computation-powered interactivity, expanding the document medium’s richness a good deal. Static documents take their share of the blame in making us “information rich, but understanding poor”, to repurpose the common saying.

Static documents are like a very lossy format, fuzzifying clear and fuzzy thinking alike, disguising problems, and often resulting in overwhelming communication failures: undeployed R&D, misunderstood risks, and wrong management decisions, not to mention limiting the flow of information intrinsic to education. The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps-for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts.įor too long, authors have had to aggressively compress their ideas to fit down the narrow communication pipe of static documents, only for readers at the other end to try to uncompress, reconstruct, and guess at the original landscape of information. Today we launched our Computable Document Format, or CDF, to bring documents to life with the power of computation.ĬDF binds together and refines lots of technologies and ideas from our last 20+ years into a single standard-knowledge apps, symbolic documents, automation layering, and democratized computation, to name a few.ĭisparate though these might appear, they come together in one coherent aim for CDF: connecting authors and readers much better than ever before.

How to play cdf files