Paul Fritze Educational Multimedia The University of MelbourneQuickBooks are QuickTime movies that, with the addition of an information file, can support novel interactive capabilities. The paper will outline how they can focus production effort and creativity toward the content and media expert, using standard word processing or graphics programs, and away from specialised computer expertise and complicated authoring environments. They encourage a highly modular and structured approach to design, distributing work load and maximising resource usage. They are created directly from the original document written in programs such as Word, Pagemaker, Photoshop etc. but 'printed' to a QuickTime file. Interactions and links are very quickly added using a simple but extendable authoring tool, to define key words, hot-spots areas and display options. A range of commands can link pages, play segments of audio or animation, open other QuickBooks or search for key words and text.
Examples of use within education include glossaries, simple branching simulations, lecture notes, interactive 'postcards' or albums of images, sound and video. The paper looks at two particular applications from the viewpoint of the document designer. In the first example, an interactive proceedings CD ROM was produced for the IFIP WG3.2 '94 conference as a collection of 10 individual QuickBook documents including the 600 page journal of papers, photo albums, conference details, business cards, audio interviews as well as guided tours of the product.
The second example is from Art History where the low technology entry level of QuickBooks has been used to integrate images more closely with the practice of writing. This has facilitated the preparation of lectures and related material in a more permanent form than traditional approaches allow and most importantly, to actively engage students with the visual properties of works of art, where images are not just incidental, but the central fact.