Making Instant Multimedia

• Most personal computers sold today are able to produce at least the basic sound and animation elements of multimedia.


• Manufacturers of popular software for word processing, spreadsheets, database management, graphing, drawing, and presentation have added capabilities or sound, image, and animation to their products. Users can use a voice annotation, picture, or QuickTime or MP2 movie from most word processing applications.

Some Helpful Ways to Organize

• Use templates that people have already created to set up your production. These can include appropriate styles for all sorts of data, font sets, color arrangements, and particular page set-ups that will save you time.


• Use wizards when they are available?\they may save you much time and pre-set-up work.


• Use named styles, because if you take the time to create your own it will really slow you down. Unless your client specifically requests a particular style, you will save a great deal of time using something already created, usable, and legal.


• Create tables, which you can build with a few keystrokes in many programs, and it makes the production look credible.


• Help readers find information with tables of contents, running headers and footers, and indexes.


• Improve document appearance with bulleted and numbered lists and symbols.


• Allow for a quick-change replacement using the global change feature.


• Reduce grammatical errors by using the grammar and spell checker provided with the software. Do not rely on that feature, though, to set all things right?\you still need to proofread everything.


• Include identifying information in the file name so you can find the file later.

Types of Authoring Tools

• Card?|or page ?|based tools
  Authoring systems, wherein the elements are organized as pages of a book or a stack of cards. Thousands of pages or cards maybe available in the book or stack. These tools are best used when the bulk of your content consists of elements that can be viewed individually, like the pages of a book or cards in a card file.


• Icon-based, event-driven tools
  Authoring systems, wherein multimedia elements and interaction cues (events) are organized as objects in a structural framework or process. Icon- or object-based, event-driven tools simplify the organization of your project and typically display flow diagrams of activities along branching paths.


• Time-based tools
  Authoring systems, wherein elements and events are organized along a timeline, with resolutions as high as or higher than 1/30 second.

Different Stages of Authoring

• Analysis - What do you need to do and what do you use to do it?


• Design - Create storyboards to tell the story of the project.


• Development - Incorporate data and set it up as a prototype or model.


• Evaluation - When the prototype application works the way you want it to, test it again, fine-tune it, make it sexy, and then review your work.


• Distribution - When it is ready to go (after the evaluation phase), make it real. Package and distribute it.

Programming Features

• Visual programming with cues, icons, and objects


• Programming with a scripting language


• Programming with traditional languages, such as Basic or C


• Document development tools

Interactivity Features

• Simple branching, which offers the ability to go to another section of the multimedia production (via an activity such as a keypress, mouse click, or expiration of a timer)


• Conditional branching, which supports a go-to based on the results of IF-THEN decisions or events


• A structured language that supports complex programming logic, such as nested IF-THENs, subroutines, event tracking, and message passing among objects and elements

Card- and Page-Based Authoring Tools

• Contained media objects: the objects were the buttons, text fields, graphic objects, backgrounds, pages or cards, and even the project itself.


• Characteristics of objects were denned by properties (highlighted, bold, red, hidden, active, locked, and so on).


• Each object would have contained programming script, usually a property of that object, that was activated when an event (such as a mouse click) related to that object occurred.


• As the message traveled, it looked for handlers in the script of each object; if it found a matching handler.


• Ex. in OpenScript (ToolBook) would look like:
  to handle buttonUp
  go next page
  end buttonUp
  

Icon- and Object-Based Authoring Tools

• Provide a visual programming approach to organizing and presenting multimedia.


• These icons can include menu choices, graphic images, sounds, and computations.

Time-Based Authoring Tools

• Adobe Acrobat Connect
  Is a complex multimedia-authoring tool from Adobe with a broad set of features to create multimedia presentations, animations, and blended learning experiences.


• Flash
  Is a time-based development environment and particularly focused on delivery of rich multimedia content to the Web.


• Director
  Is a powerful and complex multimedia-authoring tool with a broad set of features to create multimedia presentations, animation, and interactive multimedia applications. Users assemble and sequence the elements of project using Cast and Score.