Dismantling a kingdom, brick by brick

Emedia Professional, August, 1998 by Kathy Kozel

When Quark pulled the plug on mTropolis, hundreds of multimedia authors complained. And that was the problem: it was hundreds, not thousands, of dedicated users finding themselves without a valuable authoring tool. While Quark obviously needed a much larger base of consistent users to justify keeping the product alive, its explanation for mTropolis' demise focused on the slowdown in CD-ROM development. So where does that leave multimedia authoring now?

The last two years have been pretty wild for tool vendors: Strata MediaForge was killed in its infancy, Corel Click and Create came and went, Asymetrix took Aimtech, SuperCard was abandoned, MediaSweets lost its funding, and Quark bought mFactory. Meanwhile, the Web surprised them all, CD-ROM development failed to skyrocket, and Macromedia refused to surrender even a sliver of its 80 percent marketshare. And that left authoring more or less where it's been for the last eight years, with the old-timers leaving the innovators behind, fighting over scraps of a fairly small pie.

Sadly, mTropolis was the most serious contender in a new generation of tools. While it was object-oriented, author-friendly, and supported workflow among multiple authors, it also came with a $5,000 price tag that nobody wanted to pay. Though mFactory eventually hacked a zero off the end, the volume needed to support the lower price never emerged. In short, the multimedia authoring tool market is simply not big enough to make it worth the effort for tool vendors to develop the products we really need and want if we're not willing to pay vertical-market prices.

MICROSOFT GETS ITS QUEEN

In many ways, Macromedia is to the authoring tool world what Microsoft is to the personal computer market. And with fewer competitors nipping at its heels, Macromedia has less incentive to redesign and reengineer Director and Authorware. In fact, most industry insiders believe that Director 6's "behaviors" were added in direct response to the mTropolis threat.

But not everyone agrees that this response was even beneficial to Director developers, complaining that Director doesn't need to be easier, just more powerful. And pressing Macromedia to continue extending Director and Authorware may not be in our best interests either.

After all, Macromedia recently debuted two lean, elegant, and tightly focused tools built from scratch for a whole new world of authoring-Dreamweaver for Web page editing and FireWorks for Web-based graphics production. So our best chance may be to hitch a ride on this larger train called Web development. While multimedia tools have stalled, Web development tools are evolving rapidly.

Software development is another market of which authoring tools can be viewed as a tiny subset. Though multimedia titles often aren't central to a company's business, software development efforts are typically categorized as "mission-critical." And that means a company is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a robust set of tools that let multiple developers work productively together. It also means the market is large enough and interesting enough for software tool vendors to build strong products across all price ranges.

NAVIGATING THE MOAT: A NEW CONTENDER

Perhaps multimedia authoring can hitch a ride with a more general software development tool. This almost happened, after all, with the Apple Media Tool, but the authoring tool and the programming environment were kept completely separate, and it required a C programmer to extend. It almost happened again with Kaleida's ScriptX (or at least the possibility was almost there), but ScriptX was too far ahead of everything to run it.

It may finally happen for real with Java. At the JavaOne conference in March, a new California-based contender--MRC Multimedia Group--introduced "Live Beans." Described as a code-free authoring tool for "creating cross-platform multimedia applications with improved productivity and performance," Live Beans is nothing more than a set of Java Beans components designed to be used within a full-blown Java development environment, such as Symantec's Visual Cafe (for which Live Beans is currently optimized). And though its interface is nearly a clone of mTropolis, with both drag-and-drop behaviors and property editors, it maximizes a more robust development environment. So as multimedia authors, we get the benefit of Symantec's work on the underlying tool--which is supported by thousands of Java programmers--along with the quicker- and less-expensive-to-market add-ons built by innovative developers who couldn't possibly have brought to market a complete authoring tool.

Although Live Beans' combined programming and component tool approach is in a very early stage of development, and may never give us as elegant a tool as mTropolis, it (and others like it) will most likely save us from single-vendor market stagnation. There are already a number of other multimedia-friendly components out for Java, including quiz-generators and 3D chart and graph generators.