The LearningNet Authoring Tool
Work
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The authoring tool required extensive design effort. In addition Swing, the Java
widget toolkit we were depending on was going through dramatic changes. This made
the development task a moving target. Intimate knowledge of the toolkit was required
to get a product delivered, since much of what was available was either not
fully implemented (yet), or not implemented in a very user friendly way. Current SMIL (a language for synchronizing multimedia content - pronounced "SMILE") authoring tools are similar in function to the authoring tool. We defined the layout for multimedia content, we tell the tool when we want to synchronize a Table of Contents entry, HTML slide, or Image to appear or be selected (based on the timeline from the video) and the tool generates the code used by the server. We also designed a version to support the creation of SMIL, once it was supported by RealNetworks. The tool is still used today, although we never got a chance to improve on the original prototype (1999). The intent was to build a tool that would make the task of defining start and end times for multimedia files easier than using a spreadsheet and more focused than using a multimedia tool and then exporting the appropriate SMIL, XML or SLN formatted files. |
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