Product Reviews

Opus is a drag-and-drop rival to MatchWare's Mediator EXP and Macromedia's Director and Flash. Made in the UK by Digital Workshop, Opus Pro 04 is the latest in the product line that began with Illuminatus in the mid-1990s. It's easier to learn and more productive in use than either Director or Flash and costs much less than Mediator EXP. It offers more features per pound than any other multimedia product around and even boasts a built-in scripting language that allows you to add some sophisticated features.

With Opus you can create multimedia presentations ranging in complexity from PowerPoint-style slide shows to fully functional, simulation-based training and multimedia e-learning. Superficially, it resembles PowerPoint in that productions are created by dragging and dropping objects onto a page to create each frame. These frames are then sequenced to make a presentation. However, this is as far as the comparison goes: Opus is to PowerPoint what Word is to Notepad. But just as there are some tasks that suit a text editor better than a word processor, Opus is better suited to sophisticated interactive productions than simple slide shows.

Opus includes a range of both visual and non-visual objects. All the standards are present - text, graphics, video, sound, animations and buttons - while all objects can have triggers and actions attached to them. For example, a button could have a Mouse Click trigger, which would then result in one or more actions taking place, such as going to another page. Opus Pro includes about 80 actions ranging from the simple Show action to a Post Web Data action that allows your publications to communicate with an online database.

The main feature that sets the Pro version apart from its competitors, and lower-priced stablemate Opus Presenter, is its support for scripting. OpusScript is an ECMA-compliant language very similar to JavaScript and ActionScript and, while lacking the depth of ActionScript, it allows precise control including the ability to clone existing objects.

What's new in this release? In terms of features, relatively little has changed. Highlights include an integrated CD-R burning wizard, the facility to create full-screen DirectX publications, support for Ogg Vorbis sound files, built-in export to

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Flash SWF and actions to display File Save and Directory browse dialogs.

Several features previously included in the top-of-the-range Opus Pro XE have migrated to Pro 04. For example, Pro 04 allows you to protect your intellectual property by embedding MPEG and AVI video files in the published EXE. It can check to see if the original CD-ROM is in the CD drive and even offers an evaluation mode that ensures the publication ceases to function after a user-specified period of time. Many multimedia professionals would consider these features as a good enough reason to upgrade.

Most of the enhancements to Opus Pro 04 are improvements to the authoring environment and minor tweaks to existing features. For example, the previously rudimentary Script Editor has received some welcome attention. It now includes code hinting and auto-complete along with custom syntax highlighting should you dislike the existing scheme. This is useful given that OpusScript is case-intolerant and the syntax error messages are generic, so you'll need all the help you can get when debugging.

A range of options to customise the working environment have been added, and the text object in particular has been beefed up to offer greater control over appearance. This version adds a range of new wizards, including a Question Wizard that enables you to create questions in various formats; these include drag and drop, multiple choice and text input. The Startup Wizard simplifies the process of creating various publication types, including training, presentations and rolling demos. Sadly, the interface designs supplied with Opus are poor, so you'll find yourself changing the look and feel in most cases. However, using the built-in wizards ensures the background programming is in place, shortening the process of creating a working publication.

Opus allows you to deploy presentations in three main ways: offline delivery using CD-ROM/DVD-ROM, Internet delivery using its proprietary I/O plug-in, and as a Flash SWF. In practice, the latter two are likely to be used only occasionally. There's a real reluctance, especially in the corporate environment, to install any new plug-ins, so don't expect I/O to make a significant impact. The Flash export works fine for simple applications but many of Opus's most worthwhile features are disabled; a purpose-built product, such as SwishMax, would be a better choice in most cases.

For the price, Opus Pro 04 has no competition. It can't create cross-platform productions and doesn't have the depth of features found in Director or Flash. But then neither does it have the steep learning curve associated with either of these products. It's also less than half the price of its nearest equivalent, MatchWare Mediator 7 EXP. So, if you need robust multimedia presentations in a hurry, Opus Pro 04 should be the only name on your shopping list.