Managing Interactive Media Glossary: A

Glossary: A (31 entries found)

above-the-line cost: A cost that you would not be paying as part of the overhead of running the company. Your in-house resources and/or staff are a below-the-line cost whereas a freelancer hired for a particular job is an above-the-line cost. These two kinds of cost are both real, since somebody has to pay them, but your attitudes to them are likely to be different.
acceptance testing: This is testing that is applied according to pre-determined parameters agreed with the client at the end of the project to show that the project conforms to the standard expected and warrants payment.
Access: Microsoft database software sold as part of the Office suite.
accessibility: designing websites and other programs to give equal access to them by people with disabilities. In the case of web design, it includes such considerations as designing the page or a version of the page that makes sense when read by a speaking web browser (screen reader).
accessibility standards: The World Wide Web Consortium have a web accessibility initiative (WAI) which gives guidance on making websites accessible. The Watchfire company in the US developed the Bobby as an aid to assessing the accessibility of web pages. Although these are more guidelines than formal standards, following them will make the websites more user friendly for everyone, not only users with disabilities.
ActiveX: Microsoft technology for adding dynamic content to web pages.
ad hoc research: Relating to marketing, this is specific research defined and carried out for a particular purpose.
ad server: A web server which holds advertisments and supplies them for inclusion, on the fly, in web pages. By centralizing the ad serving and using cookies it is possible to determine the browsing habits of users and target ads accordingly.
adaptive palette: A relatively limited palette of colours that is calculated so as to best reproduce a full colour image. Often 256 colours but sometimes less.
ADPCM: Adaptive Delta (or Difference) Pulse Code Modulation, delta PCM is a sound-encoding method that reduces the data rate by storing only changes in the size of samples rather than the absolute value of the sample. The adaptive part is where the encoding of the difference values adapts so as to more accurately follow large changes between samples.
ADSL: Asymmetric subscriber line (or loop), a means of carrying very high speed data down a conventional copper telephone cable over distances of a few kilometres.
affiliate marketing: Where a company will pay a commission on any sales or registrations that are generated from another company promoting their products for them.
agent: A piece of software that is empowered to act on the user's behalf, to carry out tasks like network maintenance or booking a holiday. A mobile agent is an agent which is able to move around a network from computer to computer in order to do its job.
Agile: Relating to software production where small discrete units are coded every few days to allow speed of reaction from customers and faster development paths.
aliasing: Occurs when the way something is recorded produces errors that look or sound as if they should be parts of the real thing. The wheels of racing covered wagons in a Western movie, which often seem to be going backwards, do so because of aliasing. In this case the 24 per second frame rate of the film is not fast enough to accurately record the motion of the wheel. In digital audio it is possible to produce false sounds if the rate at which the sound is sampled is not fast enough to accurately represent the waveform. See also anti-aliasing.
alpha channel: Besides the red, green and blue channels of an image that determine the colour of each pixel, there can be another channel that sets how transparent the pixel is. This is known as the alpha channel. The effect is similar to a matte except that a matte is usually only 1 bit deep so that the transparency is either full (so the background shows through) or opaque. In television this is known as keying.
alpha test: The first test of a complete or near-complete application, usually by internal users. The term originates from computing, and is not always used by web agencies and multimedia companies originating from other disciplines.
always on: A mobile phone system where data connections are charged by data transferred rather than by duration of connection. Also used to describe an Internet connection using, for example, ADSL where users do not have to dial in to connect.
ambient noise or ambience: Extraneous sounds intruding on a sound recording due to such things as traffic, distant voices, bird song and the like, possibly including the echo and/or reverberation of the room. The ambient sounds may be unwanted for a news bulletin but for a drama they can help define the context of the action.
analogue: Strictly speaking an analogue is any kind of representation or similarity. However, analogue is used in interactive media (and in audio and video and electronics in general) to differentiate from digital. In digital, a signal is turned into a series of numbers, and the numbers are stored or transmitted. In analogue the signal itself is either stored or transmitted directly as a waveform, or is converted into another medium that can follow its variations and itself be stored or transmitted. Whereas analogue systems are prone to distortion and noise, digital systems are much less susceptible.
animatic: An application that demonstrates and prototypes the final application.
animation: Simulated movement of objects using computer or video effects. A simulation of a building rising from its outline foundations to completion is an example of an animation.
anti-aliasing: In graphics it is possible for edges of objects to look jagged because the resolution screen display is unable to accurately represent the object itself. To alleviate this problem the colours of the pixels around the edge of the object are mixed gradually between the object and its background. In this way the colour resolution compensates for the lack of spatial resolution that causes the jagged edges. By definition, this technique cannot be used where only pure black-and-white pixels are available. Some computer displays will now automatically anti-alias text to make it look cleaner on the screen.
applet: A very small computer application (usually in the Java language) downloaded from a website to run on the user's computer as part of a web page.
application: A general term for an interactive media (or any kind of software) title or project.
application-based program: A program that is either self-contained or which runs entirely within one environment, such as an authoring package.
artefacts: Disturbances and defects to an image or sound that are not supposed to be there, but which are the results of errors in digitization or display. (Also spelled artifacts)
ASCII: The main standard for representing letters and numbers in computing.
ASP: Active Server Pages, a server side web technology from Microsoft that allows the production of dynamic web pages. Similar to PHP in that special tags and code in the web page are interpreted by the server as the page is generated in order to insert the dynamic content.
assets: The media components of an application or web page - audio, video, graphics, animations, text - that combine to form the content.
authoring tool: A computer program designed to be simple to use when building an application. Supposedly no programming knowledge is needed, but usually common sense and an understanding of basic logic are necessary.