Fig. 16: Anark Studio's Export options (on the Mac, anyway)

The other offline export method is to a video clip, which opens up interesting possibilities. Who's to say that you can't use Anark Studio as a motion graphics program? Or as a background generation tool for video projects? There's a lot of power under the hood there, and the live compositing and real-time acceleration present in Anark Studio make it a surprisingly decent choice to use as a completely non-interactive tool. Don't get me wrong — I'm not advocating dumping After Effects or anything, but there's no reason why you can't use the two together and play off of Anark Studio's strengths to create some nice effects for video purposes.
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Learning
There's always a "huh?" period when learning a new program, and while Anark Studio is really easy to get up to speed with, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how impressed I was with both the quality and quantity of learning materials that ship with Anark Studio. First, there's an integrated help system (fig. 17) that offers tutorials and accompanying instructions to walk you through the program, as well as general reference documents. Second, Anark Studio actually ships with an actual printed manual (gasp!), complete with a full program walkthrough, scripting reference, and even more (and very useful) tutorials. In this age of razor-thin "Getting Started" manuals and unwieldy PDF documents, it's refreshing to see attention paid to proper documentation.


Fig. 17: Now that Martha Stuart is going to the slammer, I guess I can say things like "Anark Studio's integrated help system is a Good Thing" with impunity.

Disappointments
I do have some issues with Anark Studio, and even as I was compiling my list of what irks me, I realized that none of the issues fall into the "showstopper" category I usually reserve for things like pervasive instability or a key feature simply not working. However, the problems that do exist fall into two distinct categories: Mac problems, and everything else.

Mac users, I guess you should be thankful that a program like Anark Studio is even on the Mac platform at all, but that revelation gives me little comfort. Anark Studio 1.0 was a Windows-only product, and only version 2.0 and 2.5 have been available for the Mac, and it shows. This is basically a 1.0 product for the Mac, and all I can say is that I hope some of the weirdities, if I may butcher the English language, will be smoothed out in future versions. For example, there's a feature in the Inspector where you can scrub through numeric entries just using the mouse (similar to After Effects), but its damn near impossible to get the scrubber to "catch" on the Mac. Plus, some features have just plain been left out of the Mac version. For example, the Windows version has a Script Editor to write behaviors directly in the Anark Studio interface, but Mac users have to use the Export Behavior function and a text editor to write behaviors. You don't have the benefit of the complier until you re-import the text file, so if you make a syntax error or misspelled a property, you have to import over and over again and test until it works. However, it's important to note that I had zero stability problems, a fact which far outweighs any of the Mac-specific issues that I just griped about. Anark Studio and the Anark Player both perform wonderfully on the Mac, plain and simple. I just hope that feature parity with the Windows version can be achieved in future releases.

In the "everything else" category, Anark Studio suffers from being a somewhat immature development environment in general, which I'm chalking up at this point to Anark Studio trying to do too much too soon. The big issue I had is with the Timeline. It's cumbersome, for one. If you have a long sequence in the Timeline, there's no "jump to" or other easy way of traversing long distances across the Timeline. Plus, the timeline metaphor really breaks down when trying to do even moderately complex interactions, which completely threw me back to when I reviewed LiveMotion. The now-deceased former "Flash Killer" had a very After Effects-like timeline, which was really great for animation but really lousy for interaction. Anark Studio suffers from the same problem. There's no inherent way to handle markers, and dragging the time bar on a Behavior to affect when it starts and stops is really tedious and lends itself to errors. And then there's the whole debacle of trying to cram everything onto a single timeline. Sure, you can invent kludges like creating Components as virtual scenes and using the main Timeline as the "big picture" navigation, but that didn't work very well in LiveMotion and it doesn't work very well in Anark Studio. I'd like to see the Timeline handle interactive content and complex scripting a little more gracefully in future versions.

I also noticed that Anark Studio has no mechanism at all for handling large amounts of text. Of course, you can create text fields as graphics and import them into Anark Studio, but since the product lends itself so well to things like interactive product demonstrations, I was surprised that text isn't a bigger part of the feature set. By the same token, other than scripting some interactions in a browser, there aren't any "back end" features like loading external variables or reading in items from a database, for example. Not that it really suffers from that particular omission; just know that you're not going to be building applications with Anark Studio.

The last stumbling block is the general awkwardness in creating cross-platform projectors. Instead of simply being able to export out Mac projectors from a PC and vice-versa, you have to jump through some hoops to get a projector working on the platform that's different than the one you authored on. In the Windows version, Anark Studio will export a Mac OS X .app projector; however, you have to dig into it and manually add the Anark Media file and fiddle with .plist files and linked media paths to get the projector to play properly on the Mac. And in the Mac version, I couldn't even find any documentation on how to create a Windows projector. I had to copy the Anark Player application, the Anark Media file and a config file over to a PC and then fiddle with settings in the config file to make it work. There's got to be a better way, especially since the ability to create cross-platform executables is all the rage with most interactive authoring programs these days.

The bottom line
Anark Studio is full of potential but falls a little short of our highest rating owing to its relative immaturity as a creation tool. However, as Anark Studio adds a version number or three over time, I can easily see it getting to the top of our particular ratings mountain. Even today, there's no disputing that you can create some pretty compelling content with Anark Studio, and there are few (if any) packages currently available that can even compare, so Anark Studio gets a solid Strong Buy.

Anark Studio 2.5 is available now for Mac OS X and Windows for $995, with upgrades from version 1 running $149. A 15-day evaluation version is also available at Anark's Web site.