- Apple Media Tool
The Apple Media Tool was a multimedia authoring tool and associated programming environment sold by Apple in the late
1990 s. It was primarily aimed at producing multimedia presentations for distribution onCD-ROM and was aimed at graphic designers who did not have programming experience. It featured an advanced user interface with an object-oriented user model that made production of rich and complex presentations easy.History
The AMT system was developed by
Patrick Soquet , a developer inBelgium working forArborescence a French company that was later acquired by Havas. From1993 onwards it was marketed by Apple but all development was done by the independent team led by M. Soquet. In1996 development of the tool was taken over by Apple and the 2.1 version of the program was developed in house by a team of engineers inCalifornia led byDan Crow . In1997 Apple decided to concentrate its multimedia offerings onQuickTime andHyperCard and the rights to AMT returned to Havas. Patrick Soquet acquired these rights and co-founded Tribeworks and developed a new tool based on AML, callediShell .Features
The major features of the Apple Media Tool were a graphical authoring tool (AMT itself) and an associated programming environment - the Apple Media Tool Programming Environment (AMTPE) which was a compiler and debugger for the underlying Apple Media Language (AML - also known as the Key language). AMT was notable as one of the first authoring systems to support embedding Apple's pioneering
QTVR movie format.AML is an
object-oriented programming language based on Eiffel but specialized for multimedia programming. Although the AMT did not require any programming experience to use, it produced complete AML programs which were then compiled intobyte code and interpreted by a runtime interpreter. The AMPTE could be used to enhance the AML code to create more complex programs, for example accessing a database to retrieve media. AML is conceptually similar to Java, with a "write once, run anywhere" approach to cross-platform development: it had runtime interpreters for both theMac OS and Windows platforms.Awards
* 1993
MacUser Editor's Choice Award for Best New Multimedia SoftwareExternal links
* [http://www.mug.jhmi.edu/mirrors/InfoAlley/0196/29/media.html Apple Media Tool 2.0 ReadMe file]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.