To most people multimedia presentations tend to be noting more than fancy slide-shows in which you can jump from section to section depending on user input: As the user clicks or touches a button on the screen, a new screen of information is displayed ... Typically the screens remain the unaltered, just like a slide. The advantages over a real slide presentation are obvious: the slides are always in the correct order, the sound is always properly synchronized, you can jump back or jump ahead without having to click through every slide, ... Usually, the interface is a lot more intuitive than in a normal application software package (drop down menu, right-click, ...).
However, there is a whole other dimension to presentations: intelligent multimedia. Intelligent multimedia interactives include programming that causes the software to make calculated decisions on how to respond to user input. This use of an intuitive interface, combined with the linking of databases, mail/internet capabilities, ... makes for very user-friendly, powerful (presentation/information) software! In fact, most computer games could be called multimedia interactive software....
Typically, the professional multimedia authoring packages allow the "raw source files" to be transported between both platforms. This means that the only part of the authoring process that has to be done on the native platform of the targeted end user is the compiling into the standalone program. Providing the same multimedia interactive software to both platforms requires the presence of both platforms at design time. Of course, there are a lot of other considerations to be given to the different variables on the Macintosh and Windows platforms: color palettes, sound/video format compatibility, etc.
Multimedia has become the industry standard for computer systems. Macs have been sound/video capable "out of the box" for years, but Windows machines are now capable of sophisticated multimedia as well. For a Windows machine to excel at multimedia, it should have a reasonable (3D) video accelerator card, a 16-bit sound card, a Pentium or higher processor, a fast hard drive and at least 16 megabytes of RAM. To be capable of full-motion video, the computer should also have an MPEG-capable video card and at least 16 megabytes of RAM.
