Illuminatus 4

Previous versions of Illuminatus have always attempted to emulate the look and feel of paper publishing on the PC screen, with presentations known as publications which were made up of chapters and pages. However, this philosophy did place limits on the types of publications that could be created, with the typical Illuminatus presentation being pretty static and text-laden. With version 4, though, this paradigm changes completely. Indeed, Illuminatus 4 is so laden with features that it can be run in any of three user levels, from Beginner (which limits the features visible to the developer) to Advanced.

Not all the changes are immediately visible, though. Creating an application in Illuminatus remains basically the same: pages are created and objects dragged onto them, before having behaviours attached to them. The most immediately obvious change is to the interface. It's now much easier to keep track of complicated applications via the Organiser. This is probably the best method for keeping track of a multimedia project that I've seen. It presents a 'tree view' of all open publications, displaying the hierarchy of publications, chapters and pages. Looking at your presentation is made easier in version 4, too. Double-clicking a presentation in the Organiser brings up the Publication View, similar to PowerPoint's Slide Sorter. In this view you can delete, re-order and access the properties of the pages. Double-clicking a page brings up the page itself in the workspace opposite.

At the bottom of the screen, you'll find the Component Galleries. These are pre-made buttons, animations and hotspots that are ready to be dragged onto the page. You can add your own reusable items to the galleries either permanently or to the temporary Scratchpad, to speed up the creation of similar pages. This new feature indicates just how deeply Digital Workshop researched the ways in which to make programme development more efficient. But I prefer Mediator's approach of allowing one page's design to become a masterpage or template for the others.

Between the Organiser and the main workspace is the Tools toolbar which lets you add any of the eight separate objects. Each of these can have properties and actions, including the standard buttons, images, text, text input and video. Objects are added by selecting their icon and then dragging a selection box onto the page. The appearance of the object is determined by its Properties, accessed by right-clicking. In the case of images and video-clips, you're automatically prompted for the name of the source files. Buttons can either be the standard Windows objects or customised by selecting images for up, down and highlight states.

Textboxes can be used to create hypertext links to other pages. This is implemented easily: you select the text that's to become the hypertext, right-click, select from the menu and up pops the ubiquitous Actions dialog which all objects share. Split into 11 tabs, the Action dialog controls just about every object in Illuminatus, making it far easier to use the interface.

The Action dialog's Trigger tab specifies exactly what event causes associated actions to take place; for example, a mouse click. Each object can have several actions, each with its own trigger. The other tabs specify whether triggering the object causes the publication to move to another page, play a sound file or video, adjust the volume, print the page, launch another application, increment the score or assign a value to a variable.