[M4IF Technotes] GUI editor for BIFS text files?

[Jean-Claude Dufourd]

Dear Ben,
Ben Waggoner wrote:
>    Say, has anyone made a GUI editor for BIFS text files?  Editing them by
>hand is not proving to be a pleasant experience.
>  
>
There is, to the best of my knowledge:
- the Envivio suite, which is quite expensive because it does a lot more 
than just BIFS... and BIFS is not so easy to author with EBS either.
- a tool by a Korean company called Net&TV, which is very Flash-like on 
the GUI side. We saw a demo at the Shanghai MPEG meeting. I am not sure 
it is out yet, but soon.
- a tool by Hong Kong university (look for papers to WEMP)
- a tool by a university in Taiwan (same) with templates and 3D
- a tool demonstrated by HHI for 3D, not sure if it is a product yet.
- and last but not least, TDK just announced a product called 
WonderCreator in Japan (based on ENST, TILAB and Optibase technology), 
which is a template-based, 2D GUI for the Japanese market, creating BIFS 
scenes with a bias toward school usage in the available templates, to be 
released in Japan only on the 6th of December. This tool hides all of 
the BIFS complexity from the user, but of course in return you are 
constrained in what you can do, for example: in this version, no BIFS 
updates. However, no English version is planned yet for commercial release.
Since the TDK project, we have stopped doing GUIs. Our expertise being 
on the MPEG-4 authoring and not on the GUI, we lost too much time on 
this side, so we are now sticking to doing the "engines" and would leave 
GUI to others.
We have translation from a subset of Flash to BIFS, but that means no video.
We have translation from a large subset of SVG to BIFS, but that means 
no updates.
So to conclude this long answer, we do not have the right answer to your 
problem.
Best regards
JC