The Kaleida Labs Inc joint venture of Apple Computer Inc and IBM Corp yesterday finally launched its first products – the ScriptX programming language for multimedia software developers, and the Kaleida Media Player Version 1.0. Media Player is an object-oriented operating environment handling dynamic languages and digital media technologies and was created to support ScriptX applications: it is the basis of portability of ScriptX applications and needs to be rewritten for each operating system supported. It interprets a single ScriptX application at run-time and provides system-independent compositing of audio, video and graphical elements. ScriptX enables one version of a multimedia application to run on both Windows and Macintosh personal computers, with a version for OS/2 Warp planned for the second quarter of 1995. A Unix version is also planned by the Mountain View company. IBM and Apple expect eventually to bundle the Kaleida Media Player with their computers, and in the meantime, it will be included free to buyers of the first ScriptX-based applications. The ScriptX Language Kit will sell to developers for $800; the right to distribute Kaleida Media Player with applications in unlimited quantities costs $2,500 per title. The Language Kit consists of the ScriptX Language and Class Library of some 250 preprogrammed application elements referred to as core classes; the development system that includes browsers and a debugger. The object-oriented ScriptX language is claimed to support encapsulation, multiple inheritance and polymorphism. Kaleida says that it has signed up 250 – mainly small – developers to use ScriptX, and that first applications are expected by the middle of next year. IBM is saying that it will integrate ScriptX with its application development tools and technologies, including OpenDoc, VisualAge and its object-oriented extensions to programming languages. ScriptX was originally intended to come to market way back in October 1992.
