The Apple Media Tool was a multimedia authoring tool and associated programming environment sold by

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

in the late 1990s. It was primarily aimed at producing multimedia presentations for distribution on CD-ROM and was aimed at graphic designers who did not have programming experience. It featured an advanced user interface with an object-oriented user model that made production of rich and complex presentations easy. Its competitors were Macromedia Director, Quark Immedia, mTropolis, and Kaleida Labs ScriptX.

History

The AMT system was developed by Patrick Soquet, a developer in

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

working for Arborescence - a French company that was later acquired by

Havas Havas SA is a French multinational advertising and public relations company, headquartered in Paris, France. It operates in more than 100 countries and is one of the largest advertising and communications groups in the world. Havas consists of ...

. From 1993 onwards it was marketed by Apple but all development was done by the independent team led by Soquet. In 1996, the development of the tool was taken over by Apple and the 2.1 version of the program was developed in-house by a team of engineers in

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

led by Dan Crow. In 1997 Apple decided to concentrate its multimedia offerings on QuickTime and

HyperCard HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, f ...

and the rights to AMT returned to Havas. Patrick Soquet acquired these rights and co-founded Tribeworks and developed a new tool based on AML, called iShell.

Features

The major features of the Apple Media Tool were a graphical authoring tool (AMT itself) and an associated programming environment - the Apple Media Tool Programming Environment (AMTPE) which was a compiler and debugger for the underlying Apple Media Language (AML - also known as the Key language). AMT was notable as one of the first authoring systems to support embedding Apple's pioneering

QTVR QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewing ...

movie format. AML is an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of " objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of p ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

based on

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but specialized for multimedia programming. Although the AMT did not require any programming experience to use, it produced complete AML programs which were then compiled into

byte code Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (norma ...

and interpreted by a runtime interpreter. The AMPTE could be used to enhance the AML code to create more complex programs, for example accessing a database to retrieve media. AML is conceptually similar to Java, with a "write once, run anywhere" approach to cross-platform development: it had runtime interpreters for both the classic Mac OS and

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

platforms.

Awards

* 1993

MacUser ''MacUser'' was a monthly (formerly biweekly) computer magazine published by Dennis Publishing Ltd. and licensed by Felden in the UK. It ceased publication in 2015. In 1985 Felix Dennis’ Dennis Publishing, the creators of MacUser in the UK, l ...

Editor's Choice Award for Best New Multimedia Software

References

External links

Apple Media Tool 2.0 Read Me file
{{Apple software Domain-specific programming languages Hypertext Macintosh multimedia software Authoring systems Media Tool