Apple Research Labs
What is SK8?
SK8 (pronounced "skate") is a multimedia authoring environment developed in Apple's Research Laboratories. Since 1990, SK8 has been a testbed for advanced research into authoring tools and their use, as well as a tool to prototype new ideas and products. The goal of SK8 has been to enable productivity gains for software developers by reducing implementation time, facilitating rapid prototyping, supporting cross platform development and providing output to multiple runtime environments including Java. SK8 can be used to create rich media tools and titles simply and quickly. It features a fully dynamic prototype-based object system, an English-like scripting language, a general containment- and renderer-based graphic system, and a full-featured development interface. SK8 was developed using Digitool's Macintosh Common Lisp.
SK8 technology has been seeded to over one hundred sites for evaluation purposes. It has been used to prototype and develop a wide range of applications, including Cocoa. It has been used under an ARPA grant to develop authoring tools and education. It is currently influencing potential Apple products under development, such as the new versions of HyperCard and AppleScript.
For more information on the benefits of the environment, we have provided an Overview of SK8. For more technical information, check out the Architecture of SK8. For examples of some of the applications built in SK8, see our SK8 at Work page. Also, we have added a page on The SK8 Team and SK8's History to let you see a little behind the scenes.
How do I get it?
SK8 is NOT an Apple product, but Apple is releasing it as an unsupported prototype to the Apple community. It is available for download and use under a license which is designed to keep SK8 open and freely available to the user community. Go to the SK8 Download Page to get yourself a copy. Visit the SK8 Documentation Page to learn about the documentation and the mailing list, and to give us feedback.
