SK8

SK8 (pronounced "skate") was a pioneering multimedia authoring environment developed in Apple's Advanced Technology Laboratory from 1988 until 1997. The original motivating idea for SK8 was to realize a development environment that would be easy to learn and that would help people to create applications by simply drawing (visual programming).

SK8 was designed for rapid development of customizable and extensible media authoring tools and titles. SK8 was a proprietary, internal development tool used by Apple designers and engineers — it was not an Apple consumer product. SK8 has been used as a tool to prototype new ideas and products, as well as a testbed for advanced research into authoring tools and their use. The goal of SK8 has been to enable productivity gains for software developers by reducing implementation time, facilitating rapid prototyping, making development fun, and supporting cross platform development and providing output to multiple runtime environments including Java. SK8 was successfully used to create rich media tools and titles simply and quickly.