When most people think of multimedia authoring package, they think of Macromedia Director. Director is a top tool for creating interactive titles, but it isn’t the ideal program for every project. Its support for text is minimal, and you need to do a fair amount of scripting to accomplish many tasks.
Many of Director’s limitations stem from its beginnings as an animation program. Authorware, Macromedia’s top-ofthe-line authoring tool, has a different heritage. Originally designed to help educators create interactive educational software, Authorware is easier to learn than Director and far better suited to education-oriented projects. And the enhancements in version 3.0 let you combine its strengths with Director’s.
Follow the Flowline
In Authorware, you connect icons into what the program calls flowlines; these depict the flow of the project and the relationships between its elements. Authorware provides a variety of icons: some cause the project to branch to different areas, while others display QuickTime movies, play sounds, perform calculations, move objects, and more.
Some icons hold entire flowlines of their own — for instance, a flowline that displays both a background-graphic icon and a text icon might also contain an icon that leads to a flowline displaying animated navigation buttons. Each flowline appears in its own window. Alas, Authorware doesn’t provide a Window menu for quickly activating a particular window.
Version 3.0 provides a new Framework icon. Like a master page in a pagelayout program, the Framework icon lets you specify that certain elements, such as background graphics and navigation buttons, repeat on each screen. It’s a tremendous time-saver for projects or for portions of them.
The Framework icon teams up beautifully with Authonvare’s new ability to import text files saved in Rich Text Format (RTF). Say you have a five-screen segment whose screens contain paragraphs of text. Create and format the text in a word processor that can export RTF files, inserting a page break where you want each new screen to begin. Import the RTF file into Authorware, and the program creates a new screen each time it encounters a page break, adding the elements in the Framework icon as it goes. No other authoring program makes creating multiple screens this easy. The new built-in spelling checker is a plus, too.
Authorware 3.0’s text-handling features don’t stop there. A hot-text feature lets you link words or phrases and other elements — click on a word to branch to another screen, for example. Combine this with Authonvare’s outstanding textsearching features, and you can create searchable, hypertext-linked electronic books without writing a single script.
A new Navigate icon makes it easier to set up branches from one portion of a project to another. You can use it to go from one screen to the next, to jump back to the most recently displayed screen, to display a dialog box listing recently viewed screens, or to display a Find dialog box that lets you search for text.
Another great new feature lets you assign keywords to nontext items such as movies or sounds. Combine this with the Find dialog box, and users can search for these items with keywords.
As befits a program originally designed for educators, Authorware has features for creating quizzes and tracking users’ performance. It even tracks the percentage of correct and incorrect answers.
Design and Delivery
Authorware provides a set of rudimentary drawing tools — for lines, boxes, polygons, and ovals — as well as a text tool. But it can’t create antialiased text. For that you need a third-party program such as Adobe Photoshop. Authorware also has extremely limited animation features. Version 3.0 can import and play Director animations, however.
A variety of debugging features let you run a project from a particular point and trace its execution while monitoring the values of your icons and variables. You can save a completed project as a standalone application that you distribute to others. Unfortunately, Authorware can’t create native Power Mac applications, nor is Authorware itself a native Power Mac program. Autlionvare 3.0 is available for Windows, and the project file format is identical on both platforms.
Macromedia doesn’t require royalties for distribution, but if yours is a commercial product, you must include a Macromedia copyright notice in your product’s copyright screen and sign and return a distribution contract, along with two copies of your shipping product.
The Last Word
At S4995, Authorware is the costliest Mac authoring program. (Director lists for $1195.) But you get a lot for your money. Authorware 3.0 arrives on a CD-ROM packed with interactive tutorials and hundreds of media elements: great-looking controls such as 3-D buttons, dials, and sliders; backgrounds and patterns; and best of all, a portfolio of extremely useful, documented routines that you can dissect and use in your own projects.
And there’s more. When you return your registration card, Macromedia sends you a shelf-sagging software bundle that includes Fractal Design’s Painter as well as several Macromedia products: the SoundEdit 16 audio utility, the MacroModel 3-D modeling program, and Director. (This bundle may change over time, so inquire before you buy.)
If you’re getting started with multimedia and haven’t equipped your software library, this bundle will get you well on your way. But if you already have these or equivalent programs, Authorware’s $4995 price tag might be hard to swallow. Authorware is a superb program that can meet any authoring challenge, but Macromedia would sell more copies — and the world would see more great interactivity — if the program cost less.
Heid, Jim. (December 1995). Authorware Professional 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 66).
Macromedia, Inc.
Applications
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2021-12-05 / 
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Authorware_3_Mac_CD.iso
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
