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Q. What is the best presentation tool to use?
A. Anything you pick now will be superseded within 12 months.
As I said just now, most tools have major features and benefits but most also have significant shortcomings. There is still no clear winner, although I have some more to evaluate yet. Very briefly from my findings so far here are the pros and cons of the major applications I have used recently:
Director - Mostly OK cross platform but animating more than one sprite does not work well on the PC. Stochastic dissolve on the Macintosh becomes a 8x8 pixel checker pattern. Assets are bound into the movie, which can get quite large.
Apple Media Tool - Excellent cross platform functionality apart from the same chequered dissolve artefact. Cons are that on a PC it requires that QuickTime be installed. This incurs an additional license fee over and above the license fee for AMT. Useful visual editor, but the full programming kit is expensive. Assets are maintained externally and shared across platforms.
SuperCard - The latest revision is much improved and now allows the assets to be kept separately. However, I found the user interface somewhat quirky compared with other systems. This is nothing that you couldn’t get used to though. Its not cross platform yet but is likely to be soon.
HyperCard - At present, it’s Macintosh only. The colour tools are improved but still leave something to be desired. Not remotely cross platform and probably won’t be for some time. On the other hand it is a useful tool for prototyping.
Visual BASIC - Somewhat equivalent to HyperCard but PC based. Microsoft at one stage vowed that it would not be put on the Macintosh. This may be changing. You apparently require some non-trivial installation work to take place even for run-times.
Asymetrix Toolbook - Another somewhat HyperCard inspired product but apparently now it has diverged away from being a functional equivalent. I have heard it said that there are no facilities for conditional execution but if its script based, that sounds unlikely.
Kaleida ScriptX - This is supposed to be guaranteed to be cross platform on all popular models. Macintosh, PC, UNIX etc. The porting work is done courtesy of the Kaleida player. However, scripting is entirely text based and there are not many tools to assist and certainly no graphical browser yet.
Smalltalk - A variety of Smalltalk based environments are available for different platforms. Some are extremely powerful. You should watch carefully the QKS Smalltalk agents system which is likely to be available cross platform within the next 12 months.
Custom Solutions - You can write any custom solution you require. So far I have built one very primitive example in Motif and I have just completed a more sophisticated script based, hierarchical and object structured system to run on the PC. I can still see many ways in which these custom solutions can be improved but at least I get the flexibility and specific functionality I am looking for. However, clients are generally unwilling to pay for the development of the editing tools too, so the production of the scripts is still text based.
There are lots of others I have not listed here.
Check out the whole list of Cliff's pithy tips for Web developers.
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