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As said before, utilities offer a higher level of functionality
which make the implementation of more complex multimedia applications
easier and faster. In fact, the functionality of some of the utilities
is so complex that, by ``wrapping'' them into a simple program, they can
be used as a separate application programs in their own right.
The major categories of utilities are as follows:
- application program interface utilities: visual metaphors,
scripting, user interface builders, user monitoring;
- monomedia editors: 2D and 3D graphics editors, animation, video,
and audio editors;
- composition utilities: framework for hyperdocument management,
synchronization editors, interaction and graph object editors;
- miscellaneous: class browsers, generic on-line help
facilities, object monitoring.
Different MADE utilities may and do rely on one another,
too. For example, the visual metaphors, to be presented below
(see §4.1.1), are reused by monomedia editors
(see §4.2), or, to take another example, the user
interface of some of the editors may be developed with the help of
MADE user interface builders and scripting languages usable from
within MADE.
Utilities, together with MADE toolkit objects, offer a
set of building blocks which can be used in various ways to create
different types of MADE application program architectures. Some of the
most common scenarios will be described in §5 below;
however, to make these scenarios understandable, some of the most
important MADE utilities are presented below in somewhat more
details.
Next: Application Program Interface
Up: MADE: A Multimedia Application
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