Illuminatus 4.5

Digital Workshop aims, with this latest edition of Illuminatus, to offer an authoring tool that's suitable for users ranging from school children to multimedia professionals. That's a tall order and means that it can't be reliant on a scripting language, so one isn't even included. This inevitably limits what can be achieved in Illuminatus to its range of built-in functions, but it more than makes up for that in other areas.

Illuminatus follows the metaphor of a book, so presentations are called publications and contain chapters and pages. Page size and basic features, including border and window title, are set by the Chapter properties. Each page in the publication equates to a single frame, similar to a PowerPoint slide. Objects are added by clicking on the toolbox and then on the position they're to occupy on the page. You can then modify the object's properties or the Actions it can take from a couple of easy-to-use tabbed dialog boxes. Illuminatus makes things simple by including only seven fairly versatile objects, including a Slideshow object and Browser.

Despite its name, the Slideshow object is most useful for creating cel-animations since it can show a sequence of pictures with a specified delay. Unfortunately, Illuminatus has no path animation facilities to speak of. Illuminatus' Browser object is a simple way of including Web pages in your presentation. You can give your users access to live Web material by embedding the Browser object in a page and specifying the target URL.

Of course, the more features a product has, the less usable it is by new developers. Illuminatus copes with this by offering three user levels. The main effect of changing to a lower level is to reduce the number of options to those most commonly required. This is an effective way of making authoring accessible to inexperienced users.

As you'd expect, Version 4.5 isn't a major work-over when compared to version 4.1. However, Digital Workshop has cleverly aimed some of the enhancements at making Illuminatus both simpler and quicker for newcomers to use, while also beefing up some of the more advanced features.

As far as ease of use is concerned, the key inclusions are five new Wizards. The Publication and Page Wizards work together to create the structure and basic appearance of your presentation in a simple, linear fashion. The Page Wizard works very well, prompting you to select from pre-created elements to put together your page. The Gallery Wizard supports the creation of new galleries of objects to use in publications. For example, you can assemble the graphics needed for the entire presentation and then have the Gallery Wizard import these into a new gallery. This allows you to add pictures by dragging and dropping them on to the page, rather than through the Browse dialog. The Publish Wizard walks you through the later stages of preparing your publication for distribution.

Illuminatus 4.5 can be deployed on any PC running Windows 3.1 or later via CD-ROM, floppy disk, Internet or intranet. Version 4.5 lets you output to DHTML (Dynamic HTML) which, while it doesn't support many of Illuminatus' features, is a convenient, plug-in-free way of distributing apps. You can also deploy to the Internet using Digital Workshop's own plug-in, which is automatically installed when the end user accesses the Web page that contains it.

The most sophisticated of the new Wizards, the Questions Wizard, enables you to create multiple-choice and text-input questions. You specify the question stem, the options available, which answer is correct and how it should be scored. Curiously, you don't specify what feedback to give once the user has selected an answer. Instead, you can choose from a wide range of styles, including those that you've created yourself.