Talk:Adobe Authorware

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject Software (assessed as Low-importance).

re: "one of the most widely used e-learning authoring applications " Can you provide a link to the basis for this claim? Thanks.

--

The eLearning Guild survey (The Content Authoring Research Report 2005) showed that 30% of respondants used Authorware. This is a substantial fraction considering the cost of the package.

Last paragraph

I removed some lines from the last paragraph as there was many redundancies.

Mac software producing DOS code?

I used CoA (and later BCoA, and then was a beta-test site in the UK for Authorware as it developed) and I don't recall any runtime programs for DOS being produced. It was a Mac-only environment until much later, after the original Authorware supplanted BCoA. Even then, you basically had to buy the Mac version of Authorware and then an additional module to do the Windows stuff (and even then it was a poor second to the quality produced by the Mac version).

We used Videoworks II (before Director appeared) for animations because it was superior to the inbuilt capability, and at one point I tried to persuade Macromind and Authorware to consider collaborating on a joint product that combined the best of both worlds, but they refused, saying that they did not see sufficient commonality. Wow. The rest is history.

There was talk of the product eventually being able to output source code (instead of object) for a variety of programming languages (such as Visual BASIC, C++, etc) so that it could be compiled locally for a specific machine/environment but I'm not sure how that progressed - I moved on.

An interesting paradigm though - the flowline. Being able to rough out a prototype in front of management or a client and then run it with only a tiny fraction of the program written was very impressive. And to be able to do that without necessarily having any formal programming training - just by logical thinking - was also very impressive. Of course, it helped if you DID have some programming under your belt :)

But the price (in the UK) was horrendous and it destroyed its market because of that (the nearest competitor was one tenth the price). AncientBrit 19:45, 15 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

70.226.131.33

Get over it, really. I understand you are upset but this is not a forum.

"free-flow of information that had been enjoyed between Macromedia's engineering team and its beta testers was curtailed"

I was beta for Macromedia since Authorware version 3.0 (1994), participating in every one up until version 8, which was unceremoniously dropped by Adobe a full year after the merger. Up until the merger, communications between beta testers and Macromedia Engineering was ALWAYS open, with Macromedia's staff fully engaged in the beta, answering questions at all times of the day and night (because many of the beta testers were overseas), and going out of their way to solicit the beta testers for their expert opinions.

Macromedia also accepted bug reports from the field; my own contribution detecting and reproducing the bug that had existed in the Framework Icon since its inception triggered the 5.2 update.

Get over the fact you were never skilled enough to participate in the beta program, and quit shilling for Adobe.

76.201.159.247 (talk) 01:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]