Meanwhile, JVC’s VHS standard wasn’t quite as good, but they openly licensed it. You could use any of the many authoring tools, such as Authorware, but you needed an appropriate player. At the dawn of the video recording age, a battle raged about the best standard to use: VHS or Betamax. In it, Sony came out with a better standard, but kept it to themselves. The outcome: VHS won. MORE

I’ve used a bunch of desktop authoring tools – Lectora, Dreamweaver, Authorware, Captivate, and Articulate to name a few. I wish it had been around when I was pulling my hair out learning Authorware. If you want it on your own server there is a licensing fee. I haven’t really used a lot of web-based authoring tools though. I was kind of out of that aspect (development) of e-learning at the time they started becoming more mainstream. MORE

Listen, Authorware is dead, so why create a product that is trying to bring it back to life with your own product? Lots of royalty free stock photo options here – you still have to buy the license mind you, but you can find truly “free” without giving credit to anyone and add it. The data is in, the results are interesting and the competition is growing. What does it all mean? MORE

I learned Toolbook and Authorware on my own while in the program. Wendy Wickham This work by Cammy Bean is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. Cammy Beans Learning Visions Musings on eLearning, instructional design and other training stuff. Thursday, April 26, 2007 Memoirs of an "Instructional Designer" I dont have a masters degree in instructional design or education. In fact, I dont have any kind of masters degree at all. MORE

If you are an Authorware fanatic missing the old days, you are still going to miss it – because while these capabilities are being added to tools they are still not at the level of Authorware. Please answer the four questions and you will be eligible to win one free license from a variety of authoring tool vendors that were listed on my top 20 rankings for Feb. The magic 8 ball is a fun item to use. MORE

Sure, you can use the extensive list of tools on the market, but for those who want real power and complexity ala from the days of Authorware, pickings are slim. Tools these days come in three flavors. Geared toward e-learning developers and instructional designers. Geared towards the masses. A combination of both. Authoring Tools for developers. MORE

While I have seen a few that give off the “rapid build” appearance, unless you have experience with solutions in the past like Authorware, MacroMedia Director, or similar brethren, you will face some serious challenges. One sim tool I know costs 25K per license, but the majority of pure sim tools in the market cost way way below that. . Over the weekend, I did one of the most stressing things there is to do in live. Yep, house hunting. MORE

I’m not saying bring back Authorware – because, please don’t, rather I am saying push the “oomph” button to make the product robust and powerful enough with feature sets these people want. I want to thank the authoring tool vendors who provided a free license to their products (of which six of the top ten in Feb. Hi, this is the ghost of Richard Dawson bringing you another exciting episode of Authoring Tools Survey. MORE

The first edition of Easygenerator was a CD-ROM tool based on Authorware. Just to give you a small example how big this change has been: 2 years ago we sold 99% of our licenses through a network of partners. This week Easygenerator moved into a new office and that gave me the “startup feeling” all over again. We moved our entire Dutch office with one small trailer and one hour later we were working again from our new office. MORE

The big item to remember here is that it will be a separate license or licenses to use the authoring tool that is directly integrated with the LMS. The world of authoring tools started at the advanced level, Authorware, Toolbook and to an extent DazzlerMax. The problem though was that folks who had the authorware and so forth experience AND/OR folks who were ID and e-learning developers were stuck. Buying a license can be in some cases past $1,500 (per). MORE