Abstract: Methods, apparatus, systems, and articles of manufacture are disclosed to asynchronously monitor one or more provisioning tasks, the apparatus comprising: task monitor circuitry to monitor the one or more provisioning tasks, information provider circuitry to generate a task subscription corresponding to the one or more provisioning tasks, and asynchronous property collector circuitry to: create a property filter in the task subscription, request an indication of availability of a status update corresponding to the one or more provisioning tasks based on the property filter, asynchronously provision a second provisioning task that is not blocked by the one or more provisioning tasks, and in response to the availability of the status update, invoke a callback corresponding to a first completion status update or a first progress status update.

Abstract: An authoring tool has a graphical user interface enabling interactive authoring of a multimedia presentation including temporal and nontemporal media. The graphical user interface enables specification of the temporal and spatial relationships among the media and playback of the presentation with the specified temporal and spatial relationships. The spatial and temporal relationships among the media may be changed independently of each other. The presentation may be viewed interactively under the control of the author during the authoring process without encoding the audio and video data into a streaming media data file for combination with the other media, simulating behavior of a browser that would receive a streaming media data file. The multimedia presentation may include elements that initiate playback of the presentation from a specified point in time. After authoring of the presentation is completed, the authoring tool assists in encoding and transferring the presentation for distribution.

Abstract: An authoring tool has a graphical user interface enabling interactive authoring of a multimedia presentation including temporal and nontemporal media. The graphical user interface enables specification of the temporal and spatial relationships among the media and playback of the presentation with the specified temporal and spatial relationships. The spatial and temporal relationships among the media may be changed independently of each other. The presentation may be viewed interactively under the control of the author during the authoring process without encoding the audio and video data into a streaming media data file for combination with the other media, simulating behavior of a browser that would receive a streaming media data file. The multimedia presentation may include elements that initiate playback of the presentation from a specified point in time. After authoring of the presentation is completed, the authoring tool assists in encoding and transferring the presentation for distribution.