Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

. ith Amiga powered sys-
.! drive powerful multi-
\ 33tems being used to
media information
systems at such places as the
Cleveland police force,
Colchester Zoo, hotels,
petrol stations, football
grounds and a multitude of
other areas all over the
world, and at a fraction of
the cost of alternative PC
systems. The Amiga has
more than proved it has the
capabilities to be used in
such systems,
ImageVision is a new product
from a company based in
Sweden, and it is their intention to
produce and develop ImageVision to
be, at the very least, as functional as Scala
MM400, if not better,
The ImageVision package comes in a very
well presented double CD case. The actual
disk is on the front side of the CD case with
the extras CD on the other. You do not actu-
ally need a CD-ROM drive to use the program
because the entire ImageVision program and
basic tutorial are all compressed onto the single
floppy. The CD is just there to hold a far
more advanced demo script and a whole
host of extras.
Some of the extras include a wide selection
of excellent backdrops covering liquids,
stone and some more surreal types, fullscreen
Mpeg animations, along with a few
music modules and a lot of high-quality
sound samples. These are not all installed
with the ImageVision program but will, of
course, still be available off the CD.
Installation is very straightforward using
the standard installer, even though it does
take a while. A basic installation will only
require about SMb worth of hard drive space,
while if you go for the full installation including
the full CD demo script, this requires over
25Mb of hard drive space. Everything gets
copied into a single directory, apart from the
extra fonts and a couple of assigns that have
to be added to your user-startup.
When you start up ImageVision, the first
thing that strikes you is just how good looking
it is. The interface even puts MUI to
shame, but just because something is goad
looking does not particularly mean it is worth
having. This thing is going to have to be quick
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RAPHICS EDITOR
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1This built-in pad of Image Vision is where you t
o can con- in a variety of ways. You are able to choose what font the
struct your various menu screens. If you double-click y
u on text should appear as, whether it should be freely posi-
p
any menu icon in the script window you con gain p access tioned or formatted with left/right justification or centred.
e
to the graphics editor from the menu's requester. ,
Along with these, you can also add drop shadows, back-
The graphics editor seems to have been designed t with ground colour, text fill colour, or apply a bevelled effect to
the basic assumption that you will be using a background
h
the text, all of which can take their colour from a scrollable
graphic which will then have your various menu i choices colour selection at the bottom of the requester.
on top of that This is because most of the tools s available Once text has been entered you are free to move it any-
i
are geared towards laying out and presenting blocks of where on the screen you want using the mouse, or enter
s
text over a background screen. Having said that, you are
a
another section of text which you can then apply with a
able to load in brushes over your background and scale different set of effects. My of the current available colours
these to any size you wish and move them to any position. can also be changed by hitting the edit button, and this
The main tool box available on the editor's screen then pops up one of those newish Amiga colour wheel
allows you to change the appearance of the on-screen text gadgets, allowing you to choose a new colour.
I. •=irt.M1
ir
AMIGA COMPUTING
FEBRUARY 1996
11
hew/ fu
'
J
supremo Amiga multimedia package,
Neil Mohr discovers whether
lmageVision can pull off a coup
J
to learn, easy to use, and feature packed if it
is going to beat Scala,
The main interface consists of three basic
windows - the script, tools, and icon windows.
Using all three you can easily and
quickly construct complex multimedia presentations.
For each script you are working
on there is a single
.
script window A start
icon will always be the first icon you have
and from this start point you drag in new
icons, each icon relating to the action you
want to take place at that point in the script.
CONSTRUCTION
The actual Script construction is done in a
tree-style format, with Jparent icons in the
tree having 'child' icons connected from
them. As this is meant to represent the linear
sequence that the presentation will take,
only menu icons are allowed to have more
than one 'child' connection.
With a menu icon, each of its child icons
would represent a possible selection in that
menu. All the others have to be connected in
the sequence they should appear in. To
nWith aims to topple Scala
Mnit 00's reign as the
ca ption re quinwd
connect one icon to another, even/ icon has
a small white tail coming out of the top of it,
and you just grab this and drag it to the icon
you want to connect it to. The two icons will
then be linked in the tree.
Once icons have been dragged from the
icon's window into the script window they
can be moved around, selected, cut, pasted,
and if you double-click on them you can configure
the various aspects of that type of icon.
To help distinguish between similar icon
types in the script window, each icon can be
given a name that is shown in the screen
title bar when you place the mouse over it
This way of constructing the script is excellent.
It is possible to see the form that the
presentation will take straight away, and it is
very easy to change the flow of a presentation.
I was a little concerned at first that a
large script would become unwieldy because
the tree could become quite large, but to
prevent this ImageVision has a couple of
tools to help you organise the script into
sections.
The first are the group and ungroup holttions
which help you package a selected area
of icons into a single group icon on the script