Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved.
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final tutorial I completed was for games. The tutorial is a bouncing
ball game that destroys some bricks when it hits the bricks at the
top of the screen. You keep the ball from going off the bottom of the
screen by moving a horizontal bat left and right with the arrow keys.
The game is pretty much like those games from the early years of
desktop computing. I vaguely remember running a similar DOS game on
an old XT computer several years ago. It is very easy to create and
is a very simple game. I saved it to a floppy as a standalone from
the 16 bit version of Click & Create then installed it on an old
computer I have that runs windows 3.1. It also created an uninstall
option and placed icons for the game and the uninstall feature in the
applications icon group. The game ran flawlessly and it uninstalled
flawlessly. Then I attempted to create some games on my own without
much success. 
The
simple game tutorial that comes with Click & Create is very
inadequate. You only use the most basic of items and they are already
predefined for you. I have to say that while I learned enough in the
presentation and screen saver tutorials to create those applications,
the game tutorial was just too inadequate.
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& Create also includes several example applications that are
accessed via the file/view examples drop down menu. The multimedia
examples consist of real estate, art portfolio, a route 66 guide, an
absolutely stunning guide to the solar system, a car buyer's guide
and 3 samples of classic electronic books that were created with
Click & Create and distributed in Europe. The classic book
examples are outstanding. The books are animated and the text is
highlighted as it is read aloud. The screen saver examples consist of
5 different ones 3 of which are Corel advertisements. There are Corel
balloons soaring gracefully across the screen, the name Corel in gold
and animated with a black background and a bunch of falling bricks
with Corel printed on them. Another example consists of cows and
chickens with the 12 days of Christmas as a theme. The last one makes
up for the other four. It is a very cool application with a video
clip of a nasty animated guy telling you system has been infected
with his gunge virus. Then it jumps to a superhero who dons all kinds
of special clothing and equipment. Then this slimy looking crud
starts dripping down your screen (accompanied by sound effects) and
covering up whatever you have displayed. The last set of examples
consists of 6 games. One is a game that has a bat that you move from
left to right, a bouncing ball and bricks at the top the top of the
screen. It is like a sophisticated version of the game tutorial.
Another is a Chinese checkers type of game with animated marbles.
There is a car racing game, a game with a small tank and hostages
that you have to rescue, a game where Romeo has to rescue Juliet by
climbing ladders and jumping and picking up keys, .etc and finally a
math game with animation. All of these example games are on the order
of something a small child would be interested in.
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I endeavored to explore some other features of Click & Create.
One of the features I explored was Click & Create's music CD
controls. After extensive reading of the help files I was finally
able to have Click & Create play any track of a CD then eject the
CD. As near as I can tell Click & Create provides complete
control over a music CD. I then explored Click & Create's
morphing abilities. Morphing is accomplished in the animation editor.
You just place an image in the first frame, another image in the
second frame, specify the number of frames in between and let it rip.
Click & Create tweens all the images from the first frame to the
last. You do not have to specify any control points. Once the
animation is created it can be previewed and its speed can be
adjusted. From then on it pretty much plays continuously once it is
placed into the frame editor provided it is set to loop.
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& Create has some procedures that must be followed to distribute
an application outside one's organization. There are no restrictions
on internal distribution. The requirement is to obtain a developer's
package from Corel. They require a splash screen, Click & Create
logo on the package and written approval from Corel prior to
shipment. They also require 2 copies of the application with all
packaging be sent to them before they will give their written
approval. According to Corel's home page there is no charge for this
and the response time is supposed to be 2 working days.
suppose my biggest gripe against Click & Create is its lack of
documentation. Written documentation is very sparse. On line
documentation is pretty good but for some reason they decided to
reinvent the windows help file system and basically they screwed it
up. There are a lot of references to other subject areas that is not
hypertext. When you try to find these areas based on the name given
you discover that they are non-existent or, after much digging, find
what you want under another section. It gets pretty ridiculous and
needlessly time consuming after a while. The hypertext system was
perfected years ago and all they did in Click & Create was screw
it up. What you want is probably there somewhere but sometimes you
really have to dig for it. There is no toll free support and there is
no e-mail support. You must make a long distance call for support.
When I e-mailed Corel for tech support all I got back was a list of
phone numbers to call depending on what Corel product I owned.
Corel's web page does have some sample applications and more tutorial
files to download. Their web page also indicates they have forum on
CompuServe. I downloaded a file from their web page that has three
different layers of balloons with a gorgeous sky background. Each
layer scrolls continuously at a different speed. The speed increases
the further you move the cursor to the left or right. The scrolling
stops when the cursor is centered. They are supposed to have some
software available for download that will allow applications created
in Click & Create to be ported to the Mac but it is not ready yet.
November 1996
Roger A. Moncrief e-mail
All pages copyright© Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997
Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.