IBM Corp has been giving a few hints about plans for its Kaleida Inc multimedia venture with Apple Computer Inc at DB/Expo – and Microbytes was all ears. The company’s vice-president for the Apple Alliance, Richard Guarino spoke about how Kaleida will enable media rich applications to run on personal computers. Kaleida is working on multimedia authoring tools in a high-level language, intended to be used to create multimedia presentations for Macintosh System 7, OS/2, and unnamed other operating systems. There will be a run-time environment for all supported environments. Guarino seemed to be describing a portable approach in which a high-level language is interpreted, at least partially, by the run-time system. Kaleida also plans a form of consumer operating system for consumer-oriented multimedia players, and a hardware reference kit to help manufacturers build players. Kaleida is also working on electronic distribution of multimedia presentations – using a media script saver and a distributed client-server environment.
