(1) — a.. - Commodore Is Awesome

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; Adding cle ment, to a page first regtares a box on the page You can
sedeci from a va rie ty a t surrounds, but the te st a nd list boxes have pre sols
f course, all of Jimi
Hendrix's albums are
old. He's been dead for a
while now, so a new one would
come as something of a shock Still, that hasn't
stopped John Lennon or Freddy Mercury, so
maybe I should just shut up on that front and
get on with reviewing MM Experience. OK, I
hear you, alright?
Soo°, MMExperience, eh? Well, first impressions
with Optonica's program are 'Hmm...
yecch... turn-ti-turn._ bugger. Lets go through
that, shall we? The first expectoration was for
the look of the box, manual and disks; the second
ejaculation was for the look of the software
interface: the third was the wait I had
when I loaded a picture and waited for the picture
to remap, even though I hadn't set up a
palette (besides which, all the images I used to
test MME with use the same palette, it's just
that MME insists on using the bottom four
colours of any palette); and the last was the
trouble I had trying to get MME to do
something fairly basic - a slideshow.
Its not a good start is it? Firstly, why do people
insist on creating their own custom gadgets
and interfaces when a) they are really ugly and
b) the Amiga's own GUI is fine for any application.
MME uses the same dark bluey-greys
used by all Optonica's programs with square
buttons everywhere and great fat borders
around them. I'm sorry, but the whole thing
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makes the program look T less
professional and certainly
detracts from its ease of
I
use.
And then, the fact
L
that
you have to name pages
O
in
upper case only reinforces O
the idea that you are playing P with
some sort of PD demo-maker. Before I I'm
inundated with letters of righteous indignation
from all and sundry, I would like to say that, in
my opinion, programs that don't look nice on
the screen don't help the Amiga's public image
as anything other than a cheap, low-class
games machine. This is a great shame because
ROBLEMS? r
i
i
m * d
Here are some of the problems I encountered when
funning MME:
▪ Firstly, it was awkward to set the screen to Hi-res Laced
MME always wants to run in Lo-res which means
everything looks incredibly blocky.
• The next problem I encountered was with the Add Font
button in the fonts requester. It took me to Fonts.' but then
didn't do anything further. This meant I couldn't add any
fonts to the three supplied with MME - two sizes of a
blocky helvelica and one bolder Basen, all at a low size. I
finally figured out that it must be because of the CacheFont
program that I run, but that must mean that MME grabs a
fontlist in a way not thought of by CacheFont's author, odd
since no other program I have ever used has had a
problem with it.
▪ My third problem was with the F/X button. I set up the
1
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. RGE
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EFFECT lENO I
EMPTY _ i _ J
xuati AN1M \
VIDEO I
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, M M E's unique e ffe ct line is ve ry cle ve r, if a bit long-winde d. You con a ssign e ffe cts to
each of your elements including page effocts, sa mple pla yba ck or animation spooling
I Not a review of an old Jimi Hendrix I
album, but the latest multimedia
authoring package. Frank Nord
checks out MMExperience
6
1
M
P;p arir3fi
MME has some definite good points I proba-
Ny shouldn't concentrate on appearances in a
review, but this sort of kiddie block interface
really gets on my wick
Unfortunately, the feel of the software proceeds
to get more annoying, with new projects
requiring the user to input a name which is
then made into a directory in which everything
is stored. Not a problem in itself? No, but then
you can't use anything at a lower directory
level in your production, so you have to make
sure you create your productions at the root of
whatever device you are running from - even
more of a pain if you spread your elements
Mark 1 1
random effect for the pages in my project, 1 which worked
fine for the first run through. But 1 discovered 1 that when the
project has run through once and is then cycling through
again, the FIX selected reverts to the default of Fade In. It I
doesn't make any difference how often you click on the
bloody random button, it still reverts back to fade in_
Another problem I encountered was that the tutorial in
the manual referred to files I didn't hove included when I
installed the software.
But by contrast one of MME's really superb features is
runtime player which is free, small (it's only 167724 bytes
and crunched with PowerPacker that goes down to just
98756 bytes) and it runs on any machine. This is increi ibly
important because it means that no matter whether you
are creating a presentation for your own use, or creating a
CO that you will sell thousands of copies of, you won't have
to pay Optonica a license fee or royalties