MULTIMEDIA DEVELOPMENT TOOLS:

These programming tools are designed to manage multimedia elements individually and allow
interaction with users. In addition to providing a method for users to interact with the project,
most multimedia development tools also offer facilities for creating and editing text and images,
and have extensions for controlling video disc players, VCRs, and other related peripherals. The set
of what is produced and the way of presenting it to the observer is the interface, together with
what is reproduced and the way of presenting it to the observer is the human interface. These
interfaces can be defined both by the rules of what should happen with the data entered by the
user and by the graphics that appear on the screen. The equipment and programs that govern the
limits of what can happen is the multimedia platform or environment.

TYPES OF TOOLS

Development tools (or systems) are organized into groups, based on the presentation they use to
sequence and organize multimedia elements:

Card or page-based tools

Event-driven icon-based tools
Time-based and presentation tools

In these developmental systems, elements are organized like pages of a book or a stack of cards.
These tools are suitable when much of the content consists of elements that can be viewed
individually, such as pages in a book or cards in a file. Card- or page-based development systems
allow you to play sound elements, run animations, and play digital video.

Icon-based tools.

In these development systems, multimedia elements and interaction signals (events) are organized
as objects in a structural framework, or process. Event-driven, icon-based tools simplify your
project organization and always display activity flow diagrams along with branching paths.

Time-based tools.

In these development systems, elements and events are organized along a timeline with
resolutions as high as one-thirtieth of a second. Time-based tools are appropriate when you have a
message with a beginning and an end.

THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB:

Every multimedia project you take on will have its own internal structure and purpose and will
require different features and functions. At best, you should be prepared to select the tool that
best fits the job; at worst, you should know which tool can at least "get the job done." Developers
will continually improve the development tools, adding new features and improving performance
with an update cycle of six months to one year.

EDITING FEATURES.
Multimedia elements - images, animations, text, MIDI and digital sounds and video footage - need
to be created, edited and converted to standard file formats and specialized applications, and
editing tools for these elements, particularly text and still images, are often included in
development systems. As your development system has more editors, you will require fewer
specialized tools.

ORGANIZATIONAL FEATURES.

The process of organizing, designing and producing multimedia involves the creation of scripts and
flowcharts. Some development tools provide a visual flowchart system or a bird's-eye view facility
to illustrate the structure of your project at a high level. Navigational scripts or diagrams can also
help organize your project. Because designing the interactivity and navigation flow of your project
often requires a lot of planning and programming effort.

PROGRAMMING FEATURES.

Multimedia development systems offer one or more of the following approaches, which are
explained in the following paragraphs:
Visual programming with signs and icons
Programming with scripting language
Programming with traditional tools, such as Basic or C
Document Development Tools

Visual programming with icons is perhaps the easiest and most intuitive development process. If
you want to play a sound or place an image in your project, simply drag the item's icon into the
playlist; or drag it out if you want to delete it. Visual development tools, such as Action!,
Authorware, IconAuthor, and Passport Producer, are particularly useful for slide sections and
presentations.

Development tools that offer a scripting language for navigation control and allowing user actions -
such as HyperCard, SuperCard, Macropedia Manager, and ToolBook - are more powerful. As the
scripting language includes more commands and functions, the development system becomes
more powerful.

INTERACTIVITY FEATURES.

Interactivity empowers the end users of your projects by allowing them to control the content and
flow of information. Development tools should provide one or more levels of interactivity:

Simple branching allows you to go to another section of the multimedia production

Conditional branching allows you to progress based on the results of an IF THEN decision or on
events. A structured language that allows complex programming logic such as IF THEN statements,
subroutines, event tracking, and message passing between targets and elements.

PERFORMANCE SETTINGS FEATURES.

Complex multimedia projects require exact event timing. Synchronization is difficult to achieve
because there is a large variation in the performance of the different computers needed for
multimedia development and distribution. Some development tools allow you to match the
playback speed of your production to the speed of a specific platform, but others don't give you as
much control over performance on multiple systems. In many cases you will need to use the
development tools' own scripting language, or specialized programming facilities to specify timing
and sequencing on systems with different (faster or slower) processors. Make sure your
development system allows for accurate event scheduling.

REPRODUCTIVE CAPACITY.

In this part, your development system should allow you to build a segment or part of your project
and then test it immediately, as if the user were actually using it. You'll spend much of your time
moving back and forth through the build and testing processes, refining and fine-tuning the
content and programming of your project.

DISTRIBUTION FEATURES.

Distributing your project requires building an executable version using multimedia development
software. A runtime version allows your project to be reproduced without requiring a full
installation of development software and all its tools.

TOOLBOOK (WINDOWS).

It offers a Windows graphical interface and an object-oriented programming environment for

building projects, or books, to graphically present information, such as drawings, color digitized
images, text, sound and animations. A book is divided into pages and saved as a file in DOS. Pages
can contain text fields, buttons, and graphical objects, whether drawn or bitmap. You build a book
out of pages and link them together; ToolBook's OpenScript programming performs the interactive
and navigational tasks and defines how objects behave.

Keywords (hot words) in text fields can have a hyphen associated with them; these words provide
the hypertext features in ToolBook to connect related information that appears in different places
in the workbook, or in other workbooks that may be opened. Clicking on a keyword causes that
word to react like a button. ToolBook has two levels of work: the reader and the author. You
execute the scripts at the reader level. At the author level you use commands to create new books,
create and modify page focus, and write scripts. ToolBook offers linking options for buttons and
keywords, so you can create navigation scripts identifying which page to go to.

VISUAL BASIC (WINDOWS).

It is a programming system for Windows that is often used to organize and present multimedia
elements. It is composed of controls (objects) that reside in forms (or windows). It uses a language
code with syntax similar to BASIC or GW-BASIC. The program is event-driven, that is, code that is
associated with objects and is not executed until it is called to respond to events created by the
user or the system, such as a mouse click or a system timeout. Controls are used to create the user
interfaces of an application, including order buttons, radio buttons, check buttons, list boxes,
combo boxes, text boxes, scroll bars, frames, file and directory selection boxes, clocks, and menu
bars.

Once you have finished your Visual Basic project you can convert it to an .EXE file so that it can run
as a stand-alone Windows file.
ICON-BASED DEVELOPMENT TOOLS.

Icon-based, event-driven tools provide a visual programming approach to organizing and

presenting multimedia. First, you need to build a structure or flowchart of events, tasks, and
decisions by dragging the appropriate icons from the library. These icons may include menu
selection, graphic images, sound, and calculations. The flowchart graphically represents the logic of
the project. When the structure is built you can add your content: text, graphics, animation, sound
and video movies. Then, to put the finishing touches on your project, edit its logical structure by
rearranging and making adjustments to the icons and their properties.

PROFESSIONAL AUTHORWARE (WINDOWS).

Authors without a technical background can create advanced applications without any scripts. By
placing icons in a flowchart you can create sequences of events and activities, including decision
making and user interactions. Authorware is useful as a design tool for creating scene sequences
because it allows you to change sequences, add options, and restructure interactions by simply
dragging and dropping the icon. You can print your navigation maps or flowcharts, a project index
with notes with and without associated icons, layout and presentation windows, and a cross-
reference table of variables.

Authorware offers over two hundred system variables and functions for capturing, manipulating,
and displaying data, and for controlling the operation of your project. Variables include interaction,
decision, time, video, graphics, general, file, and user items; functions include math, string, time,
video, graphics, general, file, and user tasks.

Authorware provides bindings for external user functions written as DLLs on Windows.

Time-based multimedia development tools are the most common. Each uses its own unique
approach and user interfaces to manage events over time. Many employ a visual timeline to
sequence the events of a multimedia presentation, often layering elements across multiple media
or events along a scale of increments as precise as one-thirtieth of a second. Other tools arrange
long sequences of graphic frames and add the time component by adjusting the playback duration
of each frame.

ACTION! (WINDOWS).

This tool creates multimedia on-screen presentations with motion, sound, text, graphics, animation
and QuickTime. Action! It is for speakers and salespeople; for business presenters and educators
who need to create high-impact on-screen presentations quickly. It is a multimedia presentation
package; it uses a timeline to organize the elements.

MEDIA LITTLE! (WINDOWS).

It is a suite of applications that together give novice users a way to edit, sequence, and play
multimedia presentations. MediaBlitz! from asymetrix was created with the asymitrix ToolBook
multimedia system. As a result, developers can easily include MediaBlitz! streams. in ToolBook
applications. MediaBlitz! It consists of three tools: ClipMaker, ScoreMaker, ScorePlayer.

ClipMaker allows users to create multimedia items or sequences that can be named and saved to
file.
ScoreMaker graphically represents a timeline on which you can assemble sequences by dragging
them with the mouse. This allows elements to be aligned to synchronize playback in resolution to a
second with elements that can be simultaneous sequential and that can be superimposed.

ScorePlayer can record that playback as a text file describing the sequence of events, and also
assists in the execution of a selected sequence.

PRODUCER (WINDOWS).

Passport Producer is a time-based media assembly and integration tool designed to create
synchronized presentations. You can combine almost any type of data - including still images,
animation, QuickTime movies, digital audio, MIDI, and audio from CDs.
CROSS PLATFORM TOOLS.
Authorware, Director, and Producer are applications that run on both Windows and Macintosh
platforms, and their files are either executable in either environment, or binary compatible. A
binary compatible file can be read and used by Macintoshes, PCs, or on a network. Other
applications, such as PACo Producer, Windows player and ConverIt! They are created to design
executable files on both platforms. The converter works in the Macintosh to Windows direction.

You will encounter two obstacles when transporting multimedia projects across platforms; these
obstacles have to do with the different schemes that the Macintosh and Windows computers use
for managing text and colors.

If your project only uses bitmap images and sound, the case for text is moot, but if you use text in
fields or require the user to enter text, you will face size and shape issues.

Each platform also uses its own characters; some special characters may be different on other
platforms. Macintosh does not always match other platforms, so you will need a substitute
character. Here are some important tips for working on cross-platform applications:

For text inside boxes, center the text leaving plenty of space, or margin, to avoid a possible line
break on the other platform. Avoid outline and shading styles on the Macintosh. It is not currently
supported on Windows and may be automatically replaced by bold.

When the appearance of a large font is important, convert them to bitmaps by capturing the
screen before converting. If you use Adobe True Type or ATM fonts, they must be installed and
available on both platforms.