Product Reviews

Medi8or 3  [PC Pro]
COMPANY:	PRICE: £149  (£175 inc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 28  DATE: Dec 96

Quite simply, Medi8or is a cracker. Genuinely intuitive, with no code to get in the way of your creativity, it's an authoring tool for the masses. Medi8or's approach of designing each screen and then creating links between them makes it extremely easy to use.

It comes supplied on a single CD-ROM and a full install takes up about 14Mb of disk space. The manual only stretches to 120 pages, and although the on-line help is poorly structured it does contain a number of tutorials covering the way in which the authoring tool works. The overall ease of use, however, means that the manual will probably spend most of its time on the shelf unopened.

Unlike a lot of other multimedia authoring apps, Medi8or has only nine tools on screen at any one time. Two of these are drawing tools, the other is a video overlay. There are also tools for creating buttons and for adding pictures, videos, toned rectangles, text and input boxes.

The reason there are so few tools is that Medi8or works in an unusual way. Each page is made up of a number of objects, the page itself being one, upon which you add all the other elements. Certain elements lead to other pages or to actions being performed. As an example, I created a fictitious training course on using the Internet, and the first task was to create a menu page.

On the menu there are four pictures representing the four modules in the course, along with a title. I added a video clip of a rotating globe in the right-hand corner. To do this, I simply selected 'add object' from the toolbox, dragged an outline on the page and specified the name of the file to display.

The four pictures and text were added in the same way. To make the pictures link to other modules I needed to change their properties. This is a straightforward process: just right-click on an object and select Events. Indeed, it's the concept and implementation of Events that's Medi8or's strong point. Listed on the left-hand side are the different events it will respond to with this object.

For the menu we want Medi8or to respond to a mouse click. To add an event sequence, simply drag the Event from the list box into the main area to the right. You then have to specify what you want to happen when the picture is clicked. The main action is to turn to the page at the start of the appropriate module. But I wanted to do it in style

ADVERTISEMENT

so I added a Hide action which conceals the picture by sliding it to the left, plays a short sound, then slides the module title off the screen to the right.

This simple technique is the foundation of all that Medi8or does: draw an object on screen and add an action and event to control its behaviour. The page itself can have events, allowing automatic sequences to happen when the page is displayed. Pressing the Search button on the menu page causes Medi8or's built-in search engine to launch. This is a powerful feature which means Medi8or can be used for apps such as encyclop²dias and dictionaries.

Medi8or also includes an effective productivity tool: MasterPages. Although a number of authoring tools offer the same facility, rarely is it so simply implemented. In the case of the Internet application, I created a MasterPage containing navigation buttons which had events that caused the next page or previous page to be displayed or to move to the menu. The bar across the page is also common to all module pages, so it's included too. Now, when I create a new page all I have to do is attach the MasterPage to it and these features will be added to the new page.

Other events include the ability to play MIDI files, CD audio, display an index, search through a video clip, change or move the cursor, print out, log to or read a file and run another program. Two of the most powerful actions are Animate and Timeline. Now Timeline allows you to specify a sequence of actions to take place one after the other, and it's particularly useful for displaying a page object by object or for specifying a complex series of actions activated by a single event.

The Animate action really means 'Move'. By specifying points between which an object can move, simple effects can be achieved. Although there isn't a facility for cel-based animation, the effect can be produced by using the Timeline action, but this lack of support for real animation will close the door to many commonly used effects in multimedia.

A multimedia tool isn't complete without some means of receiving typed information from the user, and the Input tool serves this very purpose. It works reasonably well and can be used with the If-Then-Else action to cause an appropriate response. Medi8or supports user-defined variables, so it could be used to develop a fully fledged interactive educational or training application.

MatchWare takes the unusual step of describing all the limitations of the product on its Web site. For instance, it can't pass commands directly to DLLs or to MCI and there are a variety of other minor limitations, although some of these would only be used by a minority of authors anyway.

MatchWare Medi8or is probably the easiest to use true multimedia authoring tool available. It has some limitations, but unless you have demanding or specialist needs you'll hardly notice them. Medi8or is heartily recommended, especially at this price.

By Kevin Partner