Multimedia Tools Animate the Web

Dave Andrews

Vendors of multimedia development toolkits are preparing a variety of tools that can make your World Wide Web site come alive with music, animation, and video. While such companies as Symantec are releasing new development kits based on the Java programming language (see "Symantec Pours Java into its Development Environment" ), others offer alternatives that don't require you to learn Java, which loosely resembles C.

Macromedia's (San Francisco, CA) new ShockWave for Director allows multimedia movies created with its Director authoring package to play over the Web. ShockWave will be supported by several Web browsers, including Netscape and Internet Explorer, and it supports on-the-fly compression. Macromedia's ShockWave for Free Hand, which will provide the capab ility to display native FreeHand vector-graphics files with extreme close-up and zoom-out capabilities within Web pages displayed in Netscape Navigator 2.0, is slated to ship this quarter.

Microsoft says it will release a new beta version of its Internet Studio Web publishing system in March, with plans to release the product commercially sometime this year. With Internet Studio, Web developers can create multimedia pages without programming. Meanwhile, IBM, Microsoft, and others have proposed various extensions that improve upon the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) standard's support for 3-D animation and interactivity.

Adding interactivity is a good way to advertise on a Web page without insulting your readers. "Interactivity provides a way for end users to enjoy an advertisement and not be offended by it," says Heather Rose, senior product manager for network technologies at Macromedia. "The Web today is very similar to print, and your browser today is more like a world-wide library card. These new tools give more of a TV feel to the Web, but without turning end users into total couch potatoes."

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Web Sites are Not Just for Browsers

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Web sites are becoming much more interactive, thanks to new development tools. With Macromedia's new ShockWave player, Web developers can use the Director multimedia authoring package to create virtual magazines in which headlines, photos, and text move across your computer screen.