Authorware Professional applications are created from a palette of 11 icons. The icons represent program events and/or multimedia objects such as displays, sounds, animations, interactions, decision loops, or calculations. Within the authoring environment, these icons are arranged on a flow line to create a graphic representation of the application's logic. The relationship among the objects, and branches taken by the application, are clearly shown and the icons themselves are titled, providing easy reference. This makes application logic extremely easy to interpret, modify, and update because the structure is visible and clearly annotated.
Each icon is an object, containing both data and instructions. For example, each Display icon can hold text or graphic data, and is linked to a dialog box that allows the author to determine display effects and other attributes, such as whether the display can be moved by the user. Similarly, each Sound icon plays back audio and is linked to a dialog box that enables the author to control playback speed, concurrency, and other factors. An object can be edited directly by clicking it in the application's schematic map.
Nine interaction types are supported, including text entry, screen buttons, invisible click/touch areas, “move object” interactions, pulldown menus, keypress responses, conditional branching, time-limit branching, and tries limit branching. Authorware applications can link to one another, can launch any other Windows application, and can support external code through Windows Dynamic-Link Libraries (DLLs). Applications can be run inside the authoring environment, and edited while running. For delivery, an application is packaged with its runtime engine so that it can be distributed as a stand-alone title apart from the authoring environment.