| ThingMaker Documentation Chapter 2) About ThingMaker

| A Word About Things Welcome to the dynamic world of Things. With the purchase of this product, you've entered into an exciting, new realm of multimedia creation and exploration where you can "Make Things Do Things," and the Things you make become the basis for rich and powerful web-based interactive experiences.

What are Things? They're media objects with:

- Attributes like movement and color
- Actions like Collision, Swap and Web page links and States that respond to the actions of your Mouse.

  We like to think Things surprise, too, with the limitless possibilities they offer for making your web pages come alive.

  About Our Technology
  Once authoring multimedia required time and patience, and putting images on the web was fraught with peril. When your designs left your desktop for the world outside, anyone anywhere could claim them. It was a free-for-all.

  No longer! With ThingMaker's easy-to-use drag and drop interface, you'll be authoring and publishing Things for the web in no time. Your Things can and will do things - collide, swap, become transparent, follow a path - without any code to crunch. But more importantly, ThingMaker's state-of-the-art publishing tools will help you protect your work with lock, copyright, and credit features that give credit where credit is due, as well as let you determine subsequent use. That's a first on the web.

  No other multimedia application extends the functionality of today's HTML editing and art creation tools like ThingMaker does, or is designed with the web and Active Desktop in mind. We think of our platform as multimedia for the masses. And now it's in your hands!

  www.thingworld.com
  An important feature of ThingMaker is the ThingWorld website. At www.thingworld.com, you can download sample Things, as well as documentation and other support tools. Also available at ThingWorld are ThingViewerTM, the plug-in which allows you to view your Things with web browsers from Microsoft and Netscape, and ThingConverterTM for MacroMedia Director which lets Director users easily convert their files into Things, too. And with your personal ID page at ThingWorld, your information will link back to you, no matter how far it travels from your desktop, and that's an electronic calling card that can't be beat in today's web-based world.

  The ThingMaker Workspace

  The ThingMaker workspace is made up of:

- Tool Bar
- Gallery Palette
- Scene Window
- Settings Sheet

  The Tool Bar contains two palettes: the Tool Palette and the Actions Palette. These can be docked to the Scene Window. The Tools in the Tool Palette let you manipulate Things in the Scene Window. The Actions Palette lets you add Actions to Things. Actions provide the interactive components for your Things.

  The Gallery Palette is where you import media into ThingMaker, as well as where you save Things to use them again and again.

  The Scene Window is where you arrange Things into Scenes before publishing them.

  The Settings Palette is where you add other Actions to the Things like Copyright, Collision Detection, and Web Address linking, as well as adjust the parameters of these Actions.

  The ThingMaker Workspace

  The Tutorials that follow will introduce you to ThingMaker. Soon you will be on your way to building your own dynamic, interactive, multimedia Things.

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