Page 157 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Unit 9: Working with Animation

Authorware-3 allows authoring of programs in identical environments on either the PC or the notes
Macintosh and produce runtimes for either. Authorware’s icons hold a wealth of programming
information that never requires the user to think like a programmer.
Some icons in Authorware can manipulate media on the screen. They can display and erase
graphics, move or animate objects, play. The Audio Video Interleave (AVI) and Quick Time digital
movies as well as WAV sound files, and access videodisk and videotape players.

The new framework icon automates hypermedia interactions and provides a default navigation
structure. With a 10 page document in rich text format (RTF), it is easy to import it into the first
“page” of framework using Authorware. Authorware can create a new display page for each
hard page break in a RTF file. Eight buttons are used to move between pages, pop up a pick list
of pages, search documents and exit the framework.
Authorware-3 has added text styles that you can apply to any text (labels, menu options, scrolling
text boxes). Designing in Authorware is also allowed. Authorware elegantly provides full data
integrity for its naming of icons and variables. Change a variable name and it changes everywhere
it is used. Authorware can run timers, change the flow in response to a user, keep score and access
laserdisc players via dialog box.

Although Authorware includes ODBC to enable connectivity to and from databases, it falls short
of enabling proper database interactivity and reduces each fetched record to a single text string.
Also, even though, Authorware ships with a full assortment of buttons, dialog boxes, sliders,
gauges, scrolling text boxes and data entry boxes, it lacks such features as the critical list and
combo boxes that are used in the other programs to create the order screens. Authorware rewards
an open mind and a willingness to tackle its different approaches by giving non-programmers
accessibility and allowing them to produce complex interactivity with a minimum of programmer
like thinking. Authorware’s built-in knowledge of interaction, testing and scoring makes it a
mature and bullet proof environment for creating kiosks or CBTs.
everest authoring system
Everest Authoring System 1.5 is best suited for the developers of CBT applications who seek a
powerful but easy-to-use windows-based authoring environment. As far as CBT environments
go, Everest (a Windows 3.1 application that also plays back on Windows 95) features strong
multimedia support, enough object orientation to improve the productivity over competing
products and great technical support. Everest’s nearly seamless multi-paradigmatic approach
includes such features as visual programming with icons, direct manipulation of interface
elements and procedural programming. Everest has successfully integrated these elements making
applications development easier.
The Everest development environment opens with multiple views of an application. In Everest’s
application creation, the user starts off with a library and names an initial screen. Dragging a
layout object icon from the toolset onto that screen provides the basis for the first screen. The
layout object, visible as an icon on the Icon Script, also occupies the Attributes Window, in which
the user can choose a background colour on bitmap, select a screen size, and specify up to 34
more properties.

Also interface and media object icons can be dragged onto the screen; like list and combo boxes,
edit boxes, text displays, bitmap placeholders, sliders and gauges, buttons of all types, video and
audio, OLE and animation.
These objects can be made to move around, visually resize them and their properties set by clicking
on them in either the Visual Screen or the Icon Script. The placeholder objects can be left empty
or their contents can be specified immediately.
Everest’s object orientation, which supports object instancing but not sub classing, increases
developer’s productivity. For example, if suppose we dragged a button object, dropped it in

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