Microsoft polishing its Chrome
By Bob Trott
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 6:23 AM PT, Jun 12, 1998
Microsoft is set to drop beta 2 of its new interactive media graphics tool, code-named Chrome, into a private testing phase.
This week Microsoft began sending beta testers documentation on beta 2, which product manager Eric Engstrom demonstrated last week at Microsoft's Tech Ed show in New Orleans, during a speech in which Chairman Bill Gates underlined the technology's strategic importance.
A "data visualization" tool, Chrome aims to let developers add multimedia features to HTML by exposing DirectX to HTML authors. The technology likely will be available first as an add-in feature to Windows 98 as well as future versions of Windows NT; Microsoft has targeted the first quarter of 1999 for release of the full feature set.
The result, according to Microsoft, will be media integration, high-fidelity graphics, more interactive capabilities, streaming, and hardware acceleration. Microsoft recommends heavy-duty systems to run Chrome -- those with 300-MHz or above Pentium II processors, a 100-MHz bus, 4MB of video memory, 64MB of RAM, and DVD capability.
"The initial PCs that will run the Chrome feature of Windows 98 are going to be 350-MHz Pentium boxes," said Brad Chase, vice president of Windows Marketing and Developer Relations, at the PC Futures '98 show in St. Louis this week. "You're not going to be able to have this on a standard Pentium today."
Using Chrome and XML, C++, VBScript, Jscript, and other standard tools and formats, developers will be able to build animated 3-D effects that are much smaller than a comparable GIF file.
Beta testers also will receive a Software Development Kit that includes examples of effects that can be built with Chrome.
Based in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft Corp. is at microsoft.com.
Senior Editor Bob Trott is InfoWorld's Seattle correspondent.
|
