Software Review:
Astound Dynamite
Part 1
By Scott Clark
DHTML for the Masses?
With all the focus that Dynamic HTML (DHTML) is receiving from the press, you'd think that there must be a slew of DHTML tools available to create these pages easily without the need to know how to manually code DHTML. After all, there are plenty of Java and HTML authoring tools out there! Actually, there are several such tools starting to appear on the scene, and WebDeveloper.com is taking a look at several of them in this new series on DHTML tools.
If you've been following our DHTML tutorial series, you've seen some of the fabulous examples of what can be done with DHTML. You've also probably noticed that the code behind the awesome examples is some pretty hairy stuff--just a tad hard to follow for your average HTML jockey. While you'll probably agree that it can only help you to know how DHTML works, and what's going on behind the scenes, you also probably wouldn't mind a little help writing all that code. Enter Astound's Dynamite.
Astound Dynamite 1.0
www.astound.com
System Requirements
Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0
DHTML-capable Web browser (required only to view DHTML)
486 or higher processor
8MB RAM (16MB Recommended)
20MB hard disk space, CD-ROM drive, VGA display
Windows-compatible sound card required for sound
Price
Dynamite $149.95
Astound installs like most other Windows-based programs these days. You just answer the basic questions, click the installation wizards buttons, and the product is installed without a hitch. You can choose to register the product online or by sending the standard registration card in. Dynamite is like many typical visual tools, with a palette of tools on the left and the main window on the right.
The printed documentation is pretty meager (under 100 pages), leading me to believe that the software shouldn't be too complicated to operate, or Astound intends for the majority of questions to be answered in the online documentation which is included. I did what I do with all new software--I play with it blindly without opening the documentation--and I was impressed with the product's intuitiveness. Althought I finally did resort to the documentation in order to create a dynamic animation, Dynamite did pretty much what I expected it to do. After giving the small User's Guide a quick read, I was able to create a slick animation using a timeline.
Making an animation was not a simple matter, however, and I had to tweak, tweak, tweak to get it the way I wanted it. The timeline tool seemed to have many functions, but these functions are not easy to figure out. Dynamite seems to have been designed to create "presentations" such as those that you would create with Microsoft Powerpoint, in which one page leads to another, and another, etc. Each page may be set to move to the next at a specified time, and specific HTML objects may also be set to appear or disappear at specific times.
This article first appeared in January, 1998.
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