Action and Opera for Windows

One way Macromind president Tim Mott hopes to jump-start MMPC into the big time is with Macromind’s just-introduced Action product, a Windows presentation program that creates presentations on the fly using Opera, Macromind’s brand-new multimedia engine. Sources say Macromind has projected 80% of next year’s revenues on Action.

Action was designed specifically for the $200 million PC-based (as opposed to Macintosh) professional presentations market. Mott says that the $495 product, in development for a year and a half, produces the same results as a simple Director presentation, “only cheaper and easier.”

Opera makes its entrance. Action automates into a single step many of the basic functions of a presentation: growing bar graphs, bullet charts and the like. The product will import Excel graphs and create individual objects out of each bar, making such animations easier to create. MacroMind claims nothing on the market today automates business presentations to this degree.

The important news here is the Opera engine, which is a time-based, object-oriented architecture. Under Opera, each piece of a presentation is treated as a separate object; a line of text, a graphic, etc., can be controlled or edited from any one of a number of different views or edit lines.

The analogy behind Opera is this: every object in a multimedia presentation, like every character in an opera, makes an entrance, does something on stage and exits, all on very specific cues. Thus, all parts of the object’s “stage time” are individually accessible. Since the engine is based on a real-time clock, all pieces of the presentation are guaranteed to maintain the proper synchronization.

Director-compatible. Almost by definition, Opera is extensible. Ultimately, says Mott, the interactive functions of Director will be added. In addition, adding video to a presentation will be as easy as adding a video object to the library. While this is not yet a function, Mott says that plans to make it one are in place.

Opera is a core technology for MacroMind’s success, and future generations of Director-type products will certainly be built upon it. In the case of Action, however, Macromind has its work cut out to convince consumers that the presentation product differs in a fundamental way from popular products already on the market, such as Harvard Graphics and PowerPoint.

- David Baron, Denise Caruso