Illuminatus 4.5 review

Once the publication is running, Illuminatus tracks the user's response to the questions you've created by updating variables created by the Question Wizard. Illuminatus supports complex conditional looping and variable evaluation and this capability has been beefed up considerably. At last, you can use a variable instead of a filename in most cases. This lets you create re-usable pages whose contents change by altering the values of the variables.

Illuminatus' main challenger is Mediator 5, which has undergone a complete re-working since Illuminatus version 4 was released. Mediator creates products that are visually superior, since it harnesses DirectX, and has sophisticated path animation and anti-aliased text. It still has better variable handling, and now has an interface that's at least as good. It's also possible to create a single page in Mediator and base other pages on it, eliminating the need to cut and paste objects from page to page. However, Mediator 5 costs £100 more, is a little difficult to get to grips with, doesn't include different user levels and can't produce applications that will run in Windows 3.1. So, while Mediator 5 is currently the superior product for most multimedia professionals, that's not the case if you're looking for a low-cost entry into the world of multimedia authoring. With enough features to make it suitable for most tasks and a superb track record for reliability, Illuminatus is a much better choice.

Author: Kevin Partner