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TheApple Media Tool was a multimedia authoring tool and associated programming environment sold byApple in the late 1990s. It was primarily aimed at producing multimedia presentations for distribution onCD-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.[1] Its competitors were Macromedia Director, Quark Immedia, mTropolis, and Kaleida Labs ScriptX.
The AMT system was developed by Patrick Soquet, a developer inBelgium working for Arborescence - a French company that was later acquired byHavas. From 1993 onwards it was marketed by Apple[2] 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 inCalifornia led byDan Crow. In 1997 Apple decided to concentrate its multimedia offerings onQuickTime andHyperCard and the rights to AMT returned to Havas. Patrick Soquet acquired these rights and co-foundedTribeworks and developed a new tool based on AML, callediShell.[3]
The major features of the Apple Media Tool were a graphical authoring tool (AMT itself) and an associated programming environment - theApple Media Tool Programming Environment (AMTPE) which was a compiler and debugger for the underlyingApple Media Language (AML - also known as theKey language). AMT was notable as one of the first authoring systems to support embedding Apple's pioneeringQTVR movie format.[4]
AML is anobject-orientedprogramming language based onEiffel 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 intobyte code 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 theclassic Mac OS andWindows platforms.