Sophie: an Open-source Multimedia Tool

Sophie, a project to create multimedia books, is now available in Alpha release. Based on Squeak, Sophie is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Sophie is not a tool to render traditional paper books to read on your PC. The Sophie project is aimed to go beyond print and utilize the interactive capabilities of the personal computer. From the Sophie Project site:

Sophie is a digital media assembly tool which allows you to combine images, text, video, and audio into a single multimedia document. It is an easy-to-use program that let's you put together documents, slideshows, presentations, annotated videos, and more.

Sophie is based on the idea of authoring digital multimedia documents that you can publish for others to experience. It uses standard interface ideas that will be familiar to users of multimedia authoring tools such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Flash or Adobe Premiere: a time-line for time-based media, drag and drop of resources on a paged book and a traditional menu bar.

Usable right out of the box, Sophie comes from a highly experienced and dedicated team, but don't expect this version to be free of bugs. The release will give you a good idea of the product and of what's to come. The Mac and Windows version is a bit farther along than the Linux version, but the team is quickly fixing bugs on the Linux version, too.

I think the team's real challenge is not technical but business: how does one promote a new multimedia format that will compete against predominant formats such as PDF (Adobe has just released PDF format), Adobe Flash and other eBook formats?

Why don't you try it out and let's share some Sophie books. It looks like fun!

Links:
Download Sophie
Sophie tutorials
Institute for the Future of the Book