AutoPlay Menu Studio
AutoPlay Menu Studio is an application that allows you to do several different types of things. It is meant for distributing media on CD ROM. With it you can build front end menus for CDs or you can build multi-page demonstrations. It has features that allow you to password protect the contents of your CD ROM. It can also be used to create CBT (computer based training) applications. There are a lot of things you can do with AutoPlay Menu Studio and wizard options are offered to you when you first start up AutoPlay Menu Studio.
Using a wizard makes it extremely easy to use. But then, it's not hard to use starting from scratch either. The wizard just makes it quicker and makes some decisions for you.
The screenshots below will give you an idea of what AutoPlay Menu Studio can do.
You can set up your interactive sounds from the preferences menu and also the directory to where your temporary files will be stored.
The project settings dialog allows you to choose some global settings for your menu that relates to how your menu works and it's appearance.
The "Show title bar" checkbox allows you to decide whether you'd like to have a title bar on your menu. "Automatic palette management" allows you to choose whether AutoPlay Menu Studio will control the palette for your images. If you allow AutoPlay Menu Studio to control the palette, it will map your images to a common palette to stop palette clashes on 256 color systems. The Window size settings allow you to specify in pixels the width and height of the menu screen.
The StartUp Page tab lets you select a page for startup of the menu depending on the language on the users system.
The Intro Video tab allows you to set a video to play at startup. The rest of the settings on the page are pretty much self explanatory.
The Advanced tab has options for conditional expressions for objects, asking for password, and making registry entries.
To see all that is included for your project settings you can click on the tabs below. Each screenshot will be loaded in another window.
On the Page Properties dialog you can set up how your page will look and behave on open and close along with the sounds that are associated with those actions.
You can click on the tabs on the screenshot below to see a screenshot of each of the tabs. Each screenshot will open in a new window.
You can use text or image buttons. The New Image Button dialog gets you going on setting up your buttons including setting the sounds, actions, attributes, and on the advanced tab setting up language support.
Some of the actions you can create for your text or buttons are:
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No action
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Execute a program
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Open a document
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Open a URL
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Send an email (with the Open a URL command)
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Print a document
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Explore a folder
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Play multimedia
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Jump to a page in the same menu
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Exit the menu
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and set up custom verbs to open files in other applications
Click on the tabs below to view a screenshot of each of them. The screenshots will be loaded in a new window.
The Variable Manager is used to set custom variables that work at runtime with values that have been read from the users system. You really need to know what you're doing if you are going to use this option. It is very powerful. For instance, if you have a pdf document on your CD you could check the users system to see if it can read pdf documents by checking to see if Acrobat is installed. You could include Acrobat on your CD just in case the end user doesn't have it installed. Check with Adobe about and licensing restrictions that may apply for distributing the Acrobat reader.
AutoPlay Menu Studio is a very powerful tool that has many uses. I can see it being used by graphics designers to send examples of their work to prospective clients, or sending works in progress for a client to look through for approval. Of course it will do much more than that.
AutoPlay Menu Studio is very easy to use and understand. Go check it out and get yourself the demo version to try out.
AutoPlay Menu Studio
Macintosh System RequirementsNot Available for Macintosh Windows System Requirements
486 Processor
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, NT 5.0
16MB Free RAM
20MB Free HD space for installation
800X600 Display
Video card set to 32k color or greater
Sound Card
Estimated Street Price
$195.00 (US) Average Selling Price
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