Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. orel's Click & Create is a multimedia authoring application that comes on 2 CD-ROMs for a $225 upgrade price. (Since this review was published, Corel sold the software to IMSI). It runs under Windows 3.1, 95 and NT. Three installation options are offered: minimal consumes 2.1 MB of hard drive space, normal consumes 8 MB and full consumes 186 MB. The application will create both 16 bit and 32 bit applications. I installed both versions. The 32 bit applications created with Click & Create will only run under Windows 95 or NT. Click & Create will create screen savers, games and interactive multimedia presentations. In can easily and quickly create an .exe file or .scr file from existing information. The CD-ROMs contain huge quantities of fonts, clip art, sounds, music, video clips (.avi and QuickTime's .mov), fades (transitions), animations, etc.The slim manual has small color pictures of most of these items. The first 100 pages of the manual consist of general information stuff that describes the editors, the objects and how to design various applications with Click & Create. There is no tutorial in the manual. All the tutorial activity is performed by accessing the tutorial area in the help drop down menu. A guided tour, multimedia tutorial, screen saver tutorial and game tutorial are all available. Whenever the mouse pointer placed over anything a bubble always pops up to tell the user what every icon and object is used for. lick & Create has several editors, all of which are described in the manual. The storyboard editor is where you organize all your frames and apply fades to them. It provides an overview of the application. The frames will contain all your multimedia objects. By multimedia objects I mean all the various items that you may be using such as sound, video, animations, graphic images, etc. The frame editor is where you add your multimedia objects to each frame. There are several sub-editors that are accessed from within the frame editor. The animation editor, picture editor, morphing editor and step through editor are some of the more important ones. The event editor displays the various events that you have created. Normally the step through editor is used to step through whatever it is you are creating and the various events are determined there. The time line editor displays the events on a time line. Unlimited undo is available provided your machine has the resources. wide variety of objects may be used with Click & Create. General objects include quick backdrop, backdrop, active, counter, printer, clock text, question and answer, edit and RTF (rich text format). Quick backdrop allows the creation and insertion of a backdrop created within Click and Create. The quick backdrops may be solid, mosaic or gradient. All 16 million colors appear to be supported through sliders in the 32 bit version of Click & Create but only 256 colors are visible at any one time. I was never able to get more than 256 colors in the 16 bit version and no sliders were available. Another type of backdrop is a picture. I had a great deal of trouble to get this step to function as described. I could open the file from the picture editor and I could select a portion or all of it but I could never get it into my frame. I finally found the help file section that addresses this procedure and I was then able to place the background into the frame without difficulty. CD 2 has 151 terrific backgrounds that are all 640 by 480 24 bit color 120 dpi except for 3 that are indexed color 72 dpi. Active objects are animations. When this feature is selected the you are taken to the animation editor. From here you can import .fli and .flc files or create your own animation. You can not import .avi or .mov files into this editor. Control is available for standing, running, jumping, crouching climbing, appearing, disappearing .etc. Counter objects can produce bars that might be used for such things as amount of life force left to rising, falling bar charts or numbers. Printer objects allow printing from an application. Best fit, stretch to page and scaling in different directions are available. Clock objects can be used for any type of time related purposes. It can be digital or have sweep hands. It can be set up to show different pictures on different dates, change objects' positions over time, create randomness in a game, .etc. Text objects can be used for just about anything you would want to use text for. The question and answer object can be used to create tests and detecting the outcome. Trivia games, setup screens, .etc. are some other uses. The edit object is just a basic text editor. The RTF object is for rich text format importation. Using this object allows formatting such as bold, italic, .etc. to be maintained. ultimedia objects include AVI, QuickTime, QuickTime VR, FLI/FLC, CD audio, MCI and MPEG. Video objects (.avi and .mov) can be used to punch up screen savers, games, presentations, .etc. Click & Create allows the video to be resized, moved around, started at any frame, .etc. QuickTime objects work very much like .avi but also allow the volume to increased and unlike .avi clips, .mov clips can be looped so they play continuously. Animated video (.fli/.flc) objects cannot be resized and they have no sound. They do support transparency however so the background can show through. The CD audio object provides control of the CD player and thus allows any track to be played, stop, pause, resume, .etc. The media control interface (MCI) object is a Microsoft standard for sending strings of commands to control various devices. Corel's manual says to refer to Microsoft's development documentation for more information. The Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) object requires MPEG drivers which Click & Create does not provide. ame objects include score, lives and hi-scores. The score object allows the score of up to 4 players to be displayed. It can also can be changed based on collisions. The lives object is similar to the score object. Besides numbers it can also display pictures to indicate the number of lives left. The hi-scores object is self explanatory. All of these game objects can be configured to display various fonts, sizes, .etc. ontrol objects consist of button, window control, combo and list. Button objects can be a regular button, checkbox or radio button. The window control object manages the size and position of the application window. The combo object is for producing customized menus and drop down lists. It will also allow data entry. The list object is similar to the combo object but does not allow any data entry. more   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.