Product Reviews

Mediator Pro has long been the best-kept secret in multimedia authoring. However, with the release of version 7, just under two years after version 6 (see Reviews, issue 78, p164), Mediator Pro looks set to dominate the sub-£500 market. Why? Because it offers more power per pound than its competition in an easy-to-learn format.

Underlying Mediator is a single, three-stage process: add objects to the page, add events to those objects and attach actions to the events. For example, if you want to add navigation to your presentation, you drag and drop a Button object onto the page and right-click to show the Events dialog box. You then drag and drop an On Mouse Click event from the list on the left, followed by a Go to Page action from the top, and that's it - you now know enough to be instantly productive.

The most noticeable change in version 7 is a drastic improvement to the user interface, which now has a slick Windows XP-style look and feel. Little touches that will have a major impact on the developer include the tiny circle next to an object's name to indicate if it has events attached, and the optional Vertical Script view in the Events dialog.

Perhaps the biggest improvement to the development environment is the Debug window. This provides a step-by-step view of your presentation in real-time, along with the contents of any variables. Experienced Mediator developers will appreciate this feature as much as newcomers, showing that MatchWare has listened to its users rather than simply throwing in new features to grab the headlines.

That's not to say that version 7 lacks innovative new features. Perhaps the most important newcomer is the Set Property action that was added to Pro's big brother Mediator EXP 6 (see Reviews, issue 88, p187). Set Property lets you change an object's properties at run-time. For example, you can resize, move or rotate an object, and change its colour or opacity while the presentation runs. Mediator allows you to use variables with Set Property, so you could, for example, use buttons that change a variable called scale and have that reflected in the object at run-time.

Version 7

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also adds a duration field to Set Property. So if you want to slowly rotate an object, you set the rotation field to 720 with a duration of 5,000 and Mediator smoothly shows the object rotating twice over five seconds.

Set Property is really just a manifestation of a complete change in the way Mediator handles objects. Now, Mediator objects work similarly to those in Flash ActionScript and other programming languages. So a rectangle will have .x, .y, .rotate and .color properties, among many others. It's possible to read these properties as well as change them. For example, if you want to find out which frame a video clip called 'clip1' is currently playing, you simply assign a variable with the value 'clip1.frame'. The true power of this is difficult to exaggerate and it lifts Mediator Pro into a class of its own, providing unrivalled power without needing to learn a scripting language.

Mediator 7 Pro also includes support for Macromedia Flash. You can import Flash objects directly into your presentation and control them using the built-in multimedia controls or Set Property. You're also able to export Mediator 7 presentations to Flash format. Indeed, when creating a new presentation, you're asked to choose whether it's intended for Flash export, and features not supported by Flash are then disabled in the development environment. In practice, it makes relatively little difference whether or not you choose Flash at the beginning, because exporting most Mediator presentations to Flash, including those containing advanced behaviours and variables, works faultlessly.

Existing Mediator users will be delighted to know that MatchWare has finally solved the problem that meant anti-aliasing and alpha channel effects weren't applied during transitions. This led to many of us having to create text objects as graphics to avoid the dreaded 'jaggies'.

It's not all good news, though. This version includes radical changes to the underlying code, resulting in instability in certain areas. I've been using this version to create a presentation that includes Flash objects and sound files and had major problems with the reliability of the new sound system. On deploying the project, I also found that it crashes on PCs without the Flash Player installed and some Flash objects don't display consistently. However, MatchWare has produced a Service Pack that seems to fix most of the sound-related problems, and its track record suggests it will deal with the remaining instabilities quickly.

Mediator 7 Pro is a first-class authoring tool that combines real sophistication with a simple drag-and-drop development environment. It narrowly misses out on an award because it was released before all the bugs were ironed out.