Shockwave Rocks Multimedia Development

In the beginning was the Web. The people looked at text, hyperlinks, and graphics and saw that the Web was good. But the people were not satisfied. "We have seen interactive multimedia: audio, video, and animation. Multimedia is on our CDs. Surely we can put this technology on the Web!" The ground trembled as multimedia sprung forth, sending a Shockwave resounding through the Web. At least, this scenario is what Macromedia would like to see happen with its new Shockwave products.

Shockwave is about delivering interactive multimedia over the Web--a difficult proposition if you think about it. First, multimedia information requires a lot of bandwidth to download, challenging the throughput capacities of not only most modern analog modems, but also other, high-speed connections. Second, creating, manipulating, and displaying interactive and multimedia information requires great sophistication in the authoring and viewing software--sophistication that goes beyond the capabilities of today's Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) editors and Web browsers.

Many different approaches, technologies, and products are available to address these difficulties. Shockwave by Macromedia is one of the most recent and most promising technologies. Released in December 1995, Shockwave is a compression technology for integrating multimedia in a Web page for delivery over the Internet or corporate intranets. More than just another passive media plugin, Shockwave can make the media interactive. For example, you can zoom and pan through an illustration and select embedded universal resource locator (URL) links. You can also interact with net-aware, interactive presentations. In short, Shockwave extends multimedia interaction to the world of the Web.

To create shocked--compressed and optimized for Web delivery--Web pages, you first create content using Macromedia's established tools: FreeHand, Authorware, and Director. You then shock the content with a utility called Afterburner and integrate it into an HTML document. To view shocked Web pages, you must download and configure Shockwave plugins for your Web browser. According to Macromedia's latest update, the plugins are compatible with version 2.0x of the Netscape Navigator Web browser only, not with Navigator 3.0 (Atlas). Support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) 3.0 is in the form of an ActiveX control. (The Shockwave ActiveX control for IE 3.0 is publicly available from Macromedia's Web site.) Once the plugins are in place, the browser detects shocked information in a Web page and activates the appropriate plugin to process and display that information. The plugins and Afterburner utilities are free to download from Macromedia's Web site.

Shockwave is available only for Macromedia's FreeHand (digital illustration), Authorware (education-oriented multimedia development), and Director (presentation-oriented multimedia development) products. However, Shockwave for Director won't support NT until later this year. Macromedia plans to extend Shockwave technology to its other products: Extreme 3D, SoundEdit 16, and a forthcoming video production tool. Eventually, Shockwave will also deliver streaming QuickTime video and other yet-to-be-announced file formats.

To see how Shockwave performs, I created test Web pages with shocked content from FreeHand 5.0B and Authorware 3.5 on a 166MHz Pentium with 32MB of RAM running NT 3.51 (an NT 3.51 version of Shockwave for Director was not available when I performed this testing). Experience the results for yourself on Windows NT Magazine's Web site. I created the Web pages with Netscape Navigator Gold and tested them with Navigator 2.01 and the latest plugins from Macromedia's Web site.

Shocking Illustrations
The first Shockwave-enabled development application I tested was FreeHand. As Macromedia's illustration tool, FreeHand competes with Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Shockwave for FreeHand integrates FreeHand graphics onto Web pages where you can zoom, pan, and link the graphics to URLs.

Shockwave for FreeHand includes the URL Manager Xtra (a plugin for the FreeHand application), which lets you assign a URL to almost any object in an illustration, even if that object's shape is irregular or other objects partially obscure it. Unfortunately, the URL manager doesn't let you attach a URL to grouped objects. Screen 1 shows FreeHand's URL Manager palette and the Afterburner compression menu item.

After creating the illustration, I compressed it with Afterburner, reducing the file size from 196KB to 93KB. My only complaint was Afterburner overwrote an old file without asking. I then created an HTML document and integrated the shocked FreeHand file with the EMBED tag. Macromedia's information is correct: Navigator Gold consistently crashed with an application error when I tried to preview the page. With Navigator 2.01, however, the FreeHand graphic loads and displays properly. Screen 2 shows the shocked FreeHand file as it appears in Netscape Navigator.

Shockwave for FreeHand is a downloading technology, meaning the Web browser must download the entire graphic before displaying it. This approach is not a problem even for complex illustrations because FreeHand graphics are vector based. They contain less data and download faster than their bitmap counterparts (.gif, .tif, etc.). Also, you can create FreeHand graphics in 8-, 16-, or 24-bit color without significantly affecting file size.

The best part about shocked graphics is interactivity. By holding down the space bar, you can zoom in (up to 26,500%) on a graphic, and by holding down the control key, you can pan around the image with the mouse. The lines in the illustration stay smooth regardless of how far you zoom. In panning around the image, I noticed that the screen updated only when I released the mouse button rather than as I dragged the mouse. I had trouble identifying where I was in the graphic. In addition, the graphic did not appear when I printed the page.

Despite these shortcomings, content providers will find Shockwave for FreeHand useful for embedding complex graphics such as maps, schematics, or engineering illustrations onto their Web pages. You can make these illustrations as detailed as necessary to let users zoom in on the most important or most interesting aspects. You can link parts of illustrations to other URLs, giving users quick visual access to related information.

Shockwave for Authorware
Authorware competes against multimedia authoring software products such as Quest and IconAuthor and is geared toward training and education. Authorware uses an icon-based flowchart metaphor for creating multimedia content. With Shockwave, you can deliver Authorware presentations via the Web.

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