Whilst browsing Apple’s downloads for something interesting, I found/re-discovered iShell. For anyone who doesn’t know, in the early 90s, before the web happened, multi-media authoring was a big thing…. Multimedia was going to replace telly! Multimedia was going to replace paper (why would anyone doodle when you can add hyper-clicks)… Multimedia was…a bit disappointing.

Anyway, multimedia authoring tools started with HyperCard - a GUI with a scripting language underneath… then along came tools like mTropolis with which you created multimedia just by dragging objects around… and then came… iShell… which is a similarly cool tool. I vaguely remember it being very expensive, but I may be wrong.

Re-discovering iShell… all these years later, I now find that it’s free… it even has a wiki… and having watched the Crash Course video (which has a dollop of educational cringe-worthiness I quite like) it’s VERY easy to put a multimedia presentation together (with complex interaction, buttons that load URLs or forms that post to the web… etc). I found I quite liked working with iShell (compared to making a web site)… the sheer simplicity of dragging n dropping is the crack cocaine of development. You know, deep down, that developing should be as simple as thing but always ends up being about tweaking horrible text files.

The only thing wrong with it is that at the end I have to burn my project onto a CD (remember those?) … Come on Tribal Media guys …add a burn-to-web-site tool (it’s only spitting out a QuickTime file isn’t it?) and a million people will want to use it to create more-than-powerpoint presentations…

And come on guys… how about adding remote media objects, like YouTube videos, GoogleDocs, FTP folders etc….

The multimedia revolution had hidden in it the idea that people wanted to interact with media (whatever that meant). The web sure took a while to get there, but was all about participating in the production of the ( hyper ) media.

Now of course, nobody notices these two big shifts happening every day as they embed a YouTube video in their blog posts, but I still feel there is a whole heap more to come. I still feel like the right tool will unleash a whole new information revolution. You think you’re over-loaded now? It’s going to get worse (and by worse I mean better… and by better I mean more … much more).

Democratizing media/content production is a good thing… but at the moment, there aren’t millions of UK pensioners putting their thoughts and memoirs on YouTube. There will be.

So all we (the people) need is a desktop multimedia authoring environment that takes care of hosting and interaction/feedback/comments for us. Think… iShell (or other) + Wordpress (or wiki) + YouTube (or other). Of course, eventually, the tools will be online, but until then, something like iShell would do the job nicely in bridging the gap until then.

I’ve got a clear picture in my mind of what this would look like, how it would work and how it might make lots of  money, but since when did that count for anything?

Now go play…

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