MediaView is a multimedia authoring system that relies heavily on the infrastructure provided by the NeXT workstation. It supports all the usual component types--text, graphics, audio, video, and animation--plus other dynamically imported user-specified active elements. Authoring of documents makes use of the facilities provided by the NeXT Application Kit and is based on what the author describes as the “familiar…WYSIWYG word processor metaphor” or “the select/cut/copy/paste paradigm.” MediaView is thus more easily usable than other similar systems.

It is difficult to see how successful the system is; the paper suffers all the common problems of trying to demonstrate multimedia systems using static text and images on paper. Although the author claims that MediaView’s status as “an editable multimedia publication system” sets it apart from its predecessors, it is not clear that this statement is true or even what it means. On the other hand, the system is eminently usable, and the rich graphical environment of the NeXT system makes it visually attractive and interesting.