AutoPlay Media Studio 6.05

This software will help you create a professional looking interface either based on the program's templates or on your own ideas. You don't have to be an advanced user to create very nice looking autorun CD menus, electronic buisness cards, training applications and more.

Even though the interface is quite complex it doesn't take much time getting used to it. When you first open a project, on the left you have the "Project Explorer" and the "Properties" window, which of course can be repositioned or set to automatically hide according to your preferences. In the "Project Explorer" you define the structure of your multimedia application by adding pages and different kinds of objects organized into a tree hierarchy.

There are a lot of supported objects like buttons, labels, text paragraphs, images, videos, flash documents, progress bars and many others. Whenever you select an object on the right side its properties are updated in the "Properties" window. You can also double click the object to set a quick action which is to be performed when an event happens. You can also write custom scripts that will be executed when events happen. An event is something that occurs at run time while the user is using your application. This includes things like moving the mouse over an object, clicking on an object or jumping to a different page. All kinds of scripting commands are available. AutoPlay’s scripting engine is based on a popular scripting language called Lua. If you feel it's too difficult, you can stick to the predefined quick actions, which most of the time will be enough.

Pluses: Although the program is very complex, a begginer is still able to use it.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: Design any kind of interface fast and simple. With AutoPlay Media Studio it's possible to create a fully featured multimedia application in a couple of minutes. You can export it directly to a Data CD/DVD, to a folder on your hard disk, to a image file or into an email.

version reviewed: 6.0