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Creating a Multimedia Application
Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 11:01 PM by Jason Barker
It is a tremendous blessing to be able to create multimedia Bible studies for Orthodox youth. I am always amazed that I have the opportunity to not only provide resources that can assist in the spiritual growth of young people (which of course is of the highest importance), but also that I have available the technological resources that I - someone who has no training, and all but no ability, in programming - need to be able to create works that when I was a teen I never could have imagined being able to create, and to make them easily available to people around the globe. If you feel led to create multimedia resources for your church or community, I strongly encourage you to give it a try; there is a tremendous need
It is best, of course, if you are able to use some of the standard professional applications for creating multimedia applications: Adobe Director and/or Flash, as well as PhotoShop for editing images and InDesign or QuarkXPress for creating downloadable documents. However, if you are experimenting to see if you have the determination or ability to create such applications - or if you do not have the financial resources at this time to invest in such rather expensive software - there are a number of low-cost and free applications that will enable you to do a great deal of significant work.
For (relatively) low cost options for creating multimedia applications, I recommend the applications of Digital Workshop. For example, for $125 you can purchase a copy of Opus Presenter: I used an older version of Opus to create my first full multimedia application, What Can Orthodox Christianity Mean to Me? (you can download the web version - which does not have the audio and video of the CD version - here), and was amazed by how easy the program was to learn and use.
What, however, can you get for free? Unfortunately, while there are no true equivalents to Director, Flash, or the Opus programs, there are nonetheless some free and open source applications that will at least allow you to experiment with multimedia development.
Perhaps the most full-featured and well-developed open source application is OpenLazlo, an application that creates and Flash and DHTML applications. It lacks WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), which means that you cannot see on the screen what you are designing until you've compiled and exported the application, but it will allow you to create small rich media applications.
An application that will enable you to create applications closer to those I create - full publications containing text and images, etc. - is Sophie, an alpha program from the Institute for the Future of the Book. I've played with the program a little, and it is an easy - albeit, since it is an alpha version, somewhat buggy - way to create multimedia interactive texts. One of the primary limitations on the program at this point is the fact that there is no player for publications created with Sophie: users must also install a copy of Sophie in order to view the publication.
There are much better options for open source applications for photo editing and desktop publishing. A very popular and highly regarded photo application for Windows is Paint.Net. A more full-featured, multi-platform image manipulation application is GIMP; I occasionally use Seashore - a simplified version of GIMP for OS X - when I need to quickly do a simple edit on a graphic and do not want to boot Windows to run my Windows version of PhotoShop. The most widely used open source desktop publishing application is Scribus.
Again, I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in creating Orthodox multimedia applications to give some of these a try. As I said, there are no real equivalents for Director and Flash (or even Opus), and anyone who engages in professional graphic work will eventually need to acquire standard applications like Photoshop, but these open source applications will enable you to start your own development without a substantial financial outlay.
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