---
title: WWDC2004 Session 216
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-216
---

# WWDC2004 Session 216

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en welcome to session 2 16 my name is Tim Monroe I'm with the QuickTime engineering group and in a little while I'll bring up John crow me from Skylark associates we're going to talk today about alternative programming environments or languages as they seem to change the title for a quick time and let me just start off by saying that in all the digital media sessions we've heard a whole lot about Moore's law right it seems like everyone wants to talk about more as well well I'm not even going to mention the words Moore's law during this talk but I do want to talk about something which is really more important and I want to call that Twain's law and that is to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail or as we might say today modulo hammers it's all nails so the truth here is that if you have a problem you want to solve generally you are restricted to the tools that you know about and so sometimes we end up solving a problem in the wrong way because we don't really have acquaintance with the correct tools so one of the things i want to do here today is sort of throw out a survey of some of the tools that we can use to do quick time i'll talk a little bit about how we can extend some of these tools to perhaps take advantage of more than is built into the tool and then in a few minutes we're going to reveal to you for the first time an exciting new tool for windows developers so let's talk about traditional development so what I talked about alternative we do that against the backdrop of what's the tradition that we're working in usually and probably for the first eight or nine years of quick x development the standard way of doing application development was using the C programming language with what we now consider to be carbon api's or what we would then call the mac user interface toolbox in the mac operating system now on windows we can develop quicktime programs but again the standard programming paradigm is using see with believe it or not the mac OS toolbox and you interface tool box and we do that with this magical little thing called the QuickTime media layer or q KML which essentially is just a whole lot of the Mac toolbox and a whole lot of the mac OS taken over and put on top of Windows and where you actually had some choice in the traditional development model within the Ides that you would use so early on people would possibly use mpw about the system 7 time frame we would move to codewarrior very good tool on Windows you might be using visual studio and then nowadays you could still do the same sort of development using Xcode well that's okay that's great but today I want to look at what's possible apart from this traditional model and I've sort of roughly classified these into three major groups the first group is what's really fun and that's what we would call rapid application development tools so we've got cocoa we've got some very good third-party tools real basic and runtime revolution on the windows side we have visual basic and Delphi there's this news kid on the block applescript studio and then there's this thing hypercard that doesn't super cards it doesn't even want to go away so all of these development environments have some built-in support for QuickTime actually there's one of these that actually has no built-in support for QuickTime anybody know what that is visual basics put out a company by a company up in redmond and for some reason they seem to have left out the QuickTime support in their application and I'm sure this is just an oversight but enterprising third-party developers have actually stepped into this void and developed what's called an activex control so the way you would in visual basic use QuickTime is by finding an appropriate quicktime activex control adding it to your project and then going from there now here is there sort of an embarrassment of riches there are in fact three different activex controls that you could get right now to do application development in this basic on Windows it turns out that to do even a basic multiplayer a multi window player application that allows you to do editing and maybe some extra stuff none of those three existing activex controls gives you quite what you need so it's an embarrassment of riches but it's also embarrassing Lee bad and that you can go very far with any one of those three so then we have for that I'll what I'll call application frameworks so they're not really rad tools or maybe some of these are i don't know quicktime for java with the job of quicktime java was quick time for java bindings very good story for developing quicktime applications there's a cross-platform application framework called cute or cutie there's one that's apparently not very well known called wxwidgets it used to go by the name WX windows but for some reason they had to change the name and then there's a good good old power plant provides a good basis for supporting quicktime applications the last category i want to talk about is actually quite an interesting one and what i've been working with recently and that is what we wouldn't might call scripting scripting in the sense that i have a text file i type in some commands and then somehow those commands get interpreted at run time to give me a quick time application the one that i will look at in depth is tickle TK with an add-on called quicktime tickle it's a very interesting little environment we're going to be looking at a mystery guest that I won't tell you about and then I have question marks by Python Perl and Ruby and the reason I have question marks is that to my knowledge there's no out-of-the-box solution to use for instance pearl to develop a QuickTime playback and editing application but once you see what I do with this mystery guest I think you'll be convinced that you could if you wanted to use these three other scripting languages to build a QuickTime application so let's take a look here at the old way of doing things so I'm going to look at what what used to look like what I've got here is codewarrior and I've got two two projects files opened one of them is a Windows project file and one is a Macintosh so the first thing that's interesting and perhaps some you don't know is that here on Mac OS 10 I can build compile and Link an application that will run on windows so this is very nice so if you've done any quicktime programming so far and you've looked at any of the sample code you've probably bumped into this little guy QT shell it's a bare-bones quicktime playback and editing application that allows you to build for either windows or mac let me bump this up a little bit so we can actually read it you can see that the files in each of these two projects are very similar there are two whoo that's cool there's one here called win framework which is as you might guess some basic application support geared at the windows application on the mac side you can see there's a mac framework which is the same stuff for the mac side there's some common stuff which is really where all the quicktime support lies and then there's this complication which is where I would put any application specific code and in QT shell that's that's fairly empty that file so let's look at winn framework see no that's okay No so here we've got just some standard fee source code let me bump down here a little bit one nice thing is we're seeing Windows data types here bool handle H wind cars we've got LP stirrers here so and let's just look down and here we've got a window proc or where this is our wind main where we set things up and if you've ever done any windows programming you feel right at home with this this is just the kind of stuff that you expect to see let's just go down a little bit more and we actually have a window proc for our frame window so this is an MDI application and we have a wind proc for the movie windows inside of there so this is a good story right there that's the kind of mindset that Windows developers have if we look at the corresponding file on the Macintosh we get pretty much the same picture okay here's max data types this is the stuff that carbon programmers understand if we go down here we'll get to installing some carbon event handlers somewhere down here we've got event loops that's wonderful so again if you learn how to program on mac that's just the sort of stuff that you expect to see now let's look at the common file and see what we've got in there now as I said this is mostly QuickTime specific stuff okay we've got some platform-specific defines here that's okay I can handle that down here sort of we've got a file menu handling that calls application specific functions here that's good again some more wrappers for the edit menu now we're getting some quick time functions here MC cut its how we're going to handle the cut command and so forth let's go down a little bit further see what we run into fairly generic stuff here here's a nasty guy FS make FS spec for Windows programmers this is wrong in so many ways right they don't want to have to work with FS specs Epis spec is a is a relic of the mac operating system so the barriers to entry for this kind of development for Windows programmers are fairly high we're asking them to learn not only the windows way of doing things but also the Mac way of doing things so again that's a bad story so let's go back to slides that's also a bad story for cocoa developers right they don't want to have to work with those carbon data types they'd rather work with stuff that's good for cocoa well if you were at the last session the the cutie kit session you saw that we have a very good story coming out in tiger for cocoa programmers we have this new cutie kit that insulates the cocoa programmer from as much of that underlying stuff as possible wouldn't it be nice if we could do the same thing for windows and I want to invite up John to show you that we are announcing here exactly that same sort of thing for Windows developers please welcome John Berman thank you Tim I must say it gives me a kind of a perverse pleasure if you like to be standing up here at the Apple Developer Conference and talking about of all things visual basic activex and calm but whether we like it or not visual basic is probably the most popular programming environment ever there are about eight million developers out there using visual basic and with visual basic net and with C sharp now using many of the same ideas from from Visual Basic that development base is buying to grow in the coming years now much of the success of Visual Basic has been based around the component architecture that underlies the visual basic platform and that is called calm component object model and it's quite a similar story to quicktime in a way quicktime was based on a very successful at architecture that underlies the platform and if you're a calm developer or a visual basic developer and attempting to use QuickTime as tim has mentioned the choices were rather limited and some of us have been trying since in visual basic three days to attempt to use QuickTime in visual basic to develop QuickTime applications in the calm or Windows environment but with limited success so I'm delighted to announce today that Apple is finally addressing this problem and announcing a brand-new QuickTime com or activex control for QuickTime developers this control can be used in out of the box in the.net development environment and also in traditional calm development tools so we're talking about the leading RADS development tools here we're talking about vb.net we're talking about c-sharp we're talking by Delphi those are the three big ones but the comm technology underlies many other development environments and underlies many other desktop applications as well and because of this shared calm environment the QuickTime activex control can also also brings QuickTime technology into those environments as well so rather than stand up here just describing this control in detail I'd like to take you through a short development sequence what we're going to do is put together a very simple movie player and editor using the new activex control switch through the thank you okay so I'm going to launch vb.net well in fact I've already launched vb.net and I'm just going to drag in any sample application okay so this is the anybody who's used visual studio.net or vb will recognize this environment we've got a form here and I've made life easy by already populating the form with some menus but basically this application does nothing as is so the first thing we have to do is to put the new quicktime com controls on the form now I like most windows controls the comm control resides in this tool box containing hundreds of controls and it's in here under the general section sitting beside a friend so let's pop it on the forum there we go so the first public instance of the QuickTime calm control I'm going to press f4 and get some properties and this just shows the way in which you can manipulate the control in the design environment so I just want to change its name and make it might be slightly simpler I'm going to give it a plane no border and i'm going to set its position to be 0 comma 0 okay now i double-click and we go into the code behind the form now visual basic fills in a lot of this when you add the menus visual basic fills in the prototypes for the various functions so most of this code has already been written for me and I'm just going to start filling in the actual bits that depend on the control itself so first thing we want to do is we want to open the movie so we go to the to the handler that handles the open menu item I've already put in some cold here that gives us a file dialog to choose a movie so in a few lines of code hopefully less than six lines we can create a simple movie player application cutie control one dots and this is when it gets interesting because this autocomplete or intellisense technology really comes into its own because what we see now is a drop up sorry pop up menu with all of the interface methods and properties relating to the controls so I'm going to choose URL and we're going to set the URL equal to the file dialog dot I'll name there we go syntactically checked and all for me now want to implement a few other things so let's allow ourselves to close the movie set the URLs nothing and let's make sure that when we quit the applications the movie also gets closed properly now what do we want to do with the movie we want to be able to play it remember this is really basic stuff ok dot oops dot now this time instead of telling the control to play I actually want to tell the movie which is inside the control to play so we pick the next object in the hierarchy and press dot again this time we get us we get a different set of methods and properties relating not to the control but to the actual movie itself somewhere here we've got play ok and just to show that we can do other things as well we've got dot rewind ok so let's leave it at that for now let's run this application ok so it's building a binary and here we are so let's try opening a movie and here we've got a movie whoops it's set up there okay rewind it and I can play it okay so very simple quick time application developed from a visual basic skeleton in a matter of minutes that's the power of the new quicktime com control but obviously we want to do more than that and the control is quite fully featured so what I'm going to drag in now is a slightly more bait version of this skeleton application most of the code has been filled in now but we're going to add a few little interesting bits first of all we've shown we've seen how to tell the movie to do certain things send commands to the movie now we want to see how do we get some information back out of that movie so what I've done is I've set up a little media inspect reform and what I'm going to do is put some code in there here you can see the code here i can add properties and i can add sections to this little form and we're just going to type in some code so let's get the duration of the movie the widths the heights some metadata some user data from the movie so QT control 1 dot movie dot duration okay and to save you and me a lot of time I'll just copying the rest here we go oh there's one more thing I'd like to show you notice this one here track 1 let's put into this little information dialog the data format with a media format of the first track of the movie ok so we're starting to drill down into the movie here let's see how we get this so we start off with the control cutie control 1 dot movie dot watched inside a movie tracks we want the first track and we want it's a result its format ok so without looking up any documentation virtually I can use the auto complete or intellisense technology to work out what roughly looks like something I might want so that's getting information out of the movie now anybody who's developed a QuickTime application will know that very soon you need the movie or the control to tell you what's going on inside in other words you need to be able to handle callbacks or notifications now if you're a visual basic developer and you've never come across C++ or C before you don't know what a callback is you don't know what a notification is even the only thing you know about our events and sure enough we've added to the QuickTime control the suite of events which allow the control to tell the application or the underlying its parent window if you like what's going on in the control now in this simple application we would very much like the the container window to resize itself to fit the movie so let's have a look done see what events are here remember I haven't looked up any documentation I'm using this for the first time there's a size changed event that looks kind of reasonable and here is the prototype the DB puts in for me so the form i'm in is called me and i want to set its clients eyes okay the bit inside it and I want to make it equal to a new sized object this is all standard vb and the size object is to t control 1 dot width and QT control 1 dot height okay there we go notice the wavy be immediately syntactically checks the whole thing for me and underlines anything that's wrong now so that's the control telling application when it's changed size but as a quicktime developer you're probably familiar with MC action events with the need to set up a filter proc and to get information back from the movie what I'd like to do is to have this application know whenever the movie is playing and when it isn't playing in fact what I want to do is I want to make the play item in the movie menu change from play to stop and stop to play whenever the movie is playing I'm stopped okay in other words I may want to make a context-sensitive menu first of all let's go back up to the code for the play here we are and let's modify this so let's say if cutie control 1 dot movie dot rate if it's greater than 0 0 then if the rate is greater than 0 we want to make it stop so movie dot stop all the things you could you might expect her in here and play okay great that that will work fine that will stop and play in the movie but what it won't do is it won't change the label on the menu from play to stop and from stop to play so that will be a nice touch and in order to do that effectively what we really want is for the movie to be able to tell us when it's playing or when it stops this is where we come to the events that are exposed from within quick time now the way this is implemented in the QuickTime com control is that all of the objects within the control have an event listeners collection and if you're interested in an event within the control then you register for a particular event so what I'm going to do is immediately after I've opened the movie here i'm going to type QT control one movie dot event listeners dot add we want to add a new event listener notice the various options are popped up immediately for me I don't have to look up any documentation I want a high level event and I want to choose the rate changed events here okay and I'm so that tells quick time or tells the control to let me know when the movie rate has changed so how do we handle this event when it comes back to us well all of these events from within the movie are all marshaled through a single QT event call back or event handler within visual basic here's the prototype for it now rather than typing in code I'm just going to copy this here and paste it in now because you can get event lots of different events that you might register for here you might register for an event when the volume has changed when the time has changed that kind of thing when a sprite has moved lots of kind of things you can register for so obviously we need a case statement in here so we can do what you'll want to do at particular times so if I have a case here on the event changed event and I've got some cold here which simply looks at the movie rate and determines whether or not the menu play menu item should say player stop okay so let's let's leave it at that let's save this and build it hopefully it'll all work okay open a movie let's open a different bird this time not be eaters okay first of all immediately we notice that the the application window is resized to fit the movie now remember that was one line a very simple straightforward code not only that but we can scale and the application windows scales as well to fit the movie okay let's see if our play button works okay good okay let me press the spacebar Nordic said it's ready change we stop okay that's because we know that our event callbacks are actually working here so what else can you do with this control well I've got a fully baked version of this application which I'm just about to show you now full screen works as a single call cutie control movie full screen equals true so I'm just going to launch finished finished application here and do one or two quick things with it let's kill studio and kill that and open another movie okay so i've got a movie over here that i've opened in quicktime player and i'm going to say file new movie here okay so I've created an empty new movie I'm going to grab a bit of this a little bit of this snowy egret and copy it I'm going to go over here and paste it what's the command for pace beauticontrol one dot movie dot paste very simple I've now I've got a new movie here okay I can cut a bit out of it if I like okay but best of all I can go to export movie and all of the exporter's that are available to quicktime are available here to the vb developer let's give it a name Egret mouth okay so within the code I popped up the export settings dialog I can go and change those and it's basically exporting the movie at the moment okay and it's done so let's close this movie and opened the one we just exported oops how to happen but basically you can export movies from within the application I think I didn't wait until the export finished so that's visual basic.net now to develop in c-sharp is very very similar in fact the cold is almost identical to slight slightly syntactically different can we have the slides again please anybody who's developed in QuickTime or sorry in visual basic will know that the object model is something that you deal with very often and in order to expose the QuickTime API in a way which made sense to calm developers we've imposed an object model if you like on quicktime and you can see on the right hand side of the slide here that some of the elements of that object model and it's no coincidence that there's a lot of commonality between this object model and between the object model that was being described earlier as part of the QT kit okay in other words the object model of quicktime transcends the implementation details of how you actually use quicktime and that's really important thing to understand if you understand the object model as a developer then you really you can develop with QuickTime and lots of different environments just want to emphasize as well many of you might have turned up your nose when I mentioned visual basic and see developers have have a habit of doing that let's not forget that these environments particularly c-sharp Delphi and visual basic can all be used to produce very professional quicktime applications so those are the big three visual basic c sharp and vb.net but there are others and many development environments are no comma where there's a few listed here I want to draw your attention to one in particular which I've been really enjoying using and that is the trolltech QT framework or cute framework it's brilliant for cross-platform mac and windows development but it's also very good on windows because it has an excellent calm container class what i'm going to do is very quickly show you we just have the okay acute application which is identical to the visual basic application that i've just developed all the quicktime implementation uses the quicktime calm control is nothing fancy going on here and what I've added a little extra to this because it was so easy to program with a few lines of code I can grab series of interesting faces let's end with a happy face drag them over here oops this is going to crash sorry start again should have created a new movie first okay let's create a new movie okay let's grab some interesting faces again and drop them over here so these are images that I'm dropping on a cute quicktime application you notice that it's now creating a movie out of these images the code is really really simple here it's maybe four or five lines of code and I've created a simple drag-and-drop droplet if you like for creating QuickTime movies from content on your desktop and because i can get at the export menu kind of another go at exporting i can export these as a DB stream i'm going to put these okay setting is again and it's exporting at the moment so let's give it a bit of time this time close the movie open it and now we've got a DV movie created from those okay using the QuickTime object model within the control I can play with all of the various export settings and as you can see here you've got the bones of some quite powerful production tools back to the slides please so there's a couple of other a couple of other development environments which you shouldn't forget about draw your attention particularly Delphi tool book as well lots of developers using QuickTime in tool book on Windows using a calm control as I mentioned before the QuickTime an abstraction is exactly the same everywhere however because calm underlies not just developer environments but many desktop applications then all of a sudden we've got the ability to use QuickTime in places that we might never have dreamt of before so let me just show you this anybody recognize Excel I've got a list of movies down the side here and I can click on a movie it opens up with in the middle of my spreadsheet and lo and behold with a few lines of scripting code behind this worksheet I've been able to populate some cells in the spreadsheet with various pertinent details from the movie so for example there is the copyright or the full name ok but not only can I read information from the movie why can't I just type grieve in there for the name John for the author and click on the save movie cell ok just to show you I'm not doing anything behind the scenes I'm going to go and delete the contents of these cells click on a different movie click back on the same movie again and you'll notice that the name and the author has changed on that movie now I won't waste time by going into QuickTime Player to actually show you that that's happened but believe me that is actually changing the user data in the movie now this is really useful if you're production-oriented have a look at this example ok I've got a folder of movies here and now there's only five movies in this folder but you know there might be 500 movies and I'm going to read for user data fields from these movies for metadata fields and my problem is that I want to change the copyright on all of these ok so let's change the copyright to 2005 it's a spreadsheet so why can't we just do a edit fill down and let's save the movie data so we're opening up each movie in turn and writing this data back to it from the spreadsheet that's clear it and get it all back again and notice that very quickly and very easily we've changed the copyright on a whole folder of movies that's XL many of you probably don't realize that behind XL on Windows is a very powerful visual basic programming environment virtually anything you can do a visual basic you can also do in Excel lastly a very quick demonstration of another popular environment PowerPoint can we use the QuickTime control and power point of course I think yep so here we've got a movie I've added some buttons to the PowerPoint slide and then I can play the movie okay that's very simple but you can also do more here's a movie which is essentially a chapter movie it's actually a smile movie which creates a series of chapters and as you can see it's standard quicktime chapter access but what happens if i want to get at the chapters using buttons within PowerPoint well again a few lines of scripting code behind the slide and we can jump from chapter to chapter within the movie last slide a little bit of fun some of you might remember this interesting wired sprite movie this this is really to demonstrate how deep you can get within the object model with in quick time I've got two buttons down here this one turns off the left eyeball and this one turns off the right eyeball how are we doing this quick cutie control movie dots tracks sprites dot one dot visible equals false or true okay or or you can make them go cross-eyed by enlarging each of those sprites so essentially within simple desktop applications like this with the visual basic environment behind them we can use the common control to do interesting things with quicktime lastly I just wanted to come revisit the cutes framework one more time okay I mentioned that it was very good for cross-platform development and if you choose to use on the windows side the new quicktime com control and on the mac the new high movie view then you can actually create quite powerful cross-platform applications which share a lot of the code here's one I've been working on this is an application that's going to ship hopefully shortly it's all about birds believe it or not and then we've got a QuickTime movie and fortunately using virtually the same code I can create a very similar application that runs on the Mac ok so this uses a cute framework all the code is cross-platform virtually much of the QuickTime API code is also cross platform and yet we've got identifications that look very similar on two separate platforms with shared development effort that's really all I want to say any questions afterwards about other frameworks or other calm environment so I'll be happy to take and back you Tim ok so let's switch gears a little bit we've been looking at standard application development tools on Windows and also on Mac we've seen that there's some really good high level solutions coming the QuickTime kit for Coco developers the new activex come control for Windows developers for carbon developers we also have a new H I moving view that I haven't talked about here but which you should look at now what I want to do is look at this sort of scripting languages and again this is pretty cool let me come over here to demo one and open what I'm going to do is just show you the text file so this is written in a language called tikl if we look at this you can see that i can define procedures so the nice thing about tickle it's fairly readable it's got to see like syntax it's not pearl mere mortals like me can actually understand this one nice thing about tickle is that it's closely tied with a graphical user tool kit called TK and the last cool thing about tickle is that somebody cared enough about tickle TK to actually spend time developing a quicktime plugin that lets you open and display and edit and export and do all sorts of things with quicktime content using a purely scripting language so let me show how you can actually run this so this is just a text file i'm not going to compile this i'm not going to link it what I'm going to do is launch an application called wish shell so when you install tikl TK this application gets installed and it has a console here so this is almost like a terminal window I can type in if I happen to know them some tickle or TK commands and they will execute here so I'd say tickle TK interactive interpreter i'm going to type in a TK command top-level let's call it su top level is the way you create a new top-level window so i'll hit return there and lo and behold instantly i have a new window on the screen so by typing in some commands i get a nice gooey element so let's so that I quit that alright let's launch it again now I showed you that script of actually quite lengthy script of tickle TK and quicktime tickle commands I'm going to open that with a source command here I'm just and what we notice is that the console window and the the the basic window it gives me have gone away i explicitly hid those and now i have a menu bar with commands that look fairly reasonable for QuickTime movies so let's see if I can open a QuickTime movie okay here's some MPEG fours and it will play them just like you'd expect I can come in here and cut I can come over here and say paste oh maybe I like that clip so much i'll paste it again one nice thing about quicktime tickle is that i can then come back here undo the second paste undo the first paste excuse me undo the cut so i have unlimited levels of undo so that's really pretty cool i showed that earlier on monday for the cocoa kid and you expect that with cocoa you don't necessarily expect that with just a standard scripting language so that's quick time that's tickle TK and quicktime tickle let's go back to slides briefly now it's time for our mystery guest okay and I won't reveal what that is let me motivate that first so let me quit here let's open up a terminal window and I have some commands have already run here it turns out that if you let's try this if I LS user bin [Music] let's see what matches user been w is star I have three things there so when you install tikl TK you get not only that gooey app that I launched but also these tools that you can run on the command line and I've already prepackaged some commands here so let's notice it command one here it says echo WM withdraw dot that means hide the the window that it opens then do top level foo which I did before and pipe that to one of those wish command so let's run one there see what happens lo and behold that wish application opened and it did what I wanted it hid the the default window you get and it opened a new window called foo so what does this tell me it tells me that I can use the standard input of that command line version of the tickle TK interpreter to do command now I've also got another one here let's do 33 is says echo this command that's some tickle script that means put string hello world pipe that through the tickle TK interpreter and let's see what it does it echoes hello world so that's sort of a roundabout way of doing the hello world thing namely send this string of tickle commands over to the tickle TK interpreter and the tickle command is just to your standard output right this string so what have we learned that command line version of the tickle TK interpreter take standard input it's got a standard output now here lights may be going on in your head you can do some pretty funky stuff here why well I could write a shell script or a perl script or whatever that sense some standard output to the tickle TK interpreter and if I was clever if I had a bi-directional pipe I could get some output back so what this shows us is if I know some chick as a DK if I know TK well enough to be able to do the graphical user interface stuff I don't need tickle at all I don't need that i could write my application in some other language all together so this is where our mystery guest comes in so what I did is when I had that realization that I can just plug in any language I want and as long as that script for that language or that application knows how to write TK to its standard output and read things in from the standard input I'm golden so can we go back here my mystery guest so what I was doing I was looking around the UNIX system and I came across a small little language hasn't been used in years and that language is awk so I decided I would write a full feature to quicktime application using just awk and let me show you that that actually works so I need one more piece of this puzzle I need something that takes the standard output of the tickle TK interpreter and sends it to awk and then I need something that takes the standard output of awk and sends it to the tickle TK interpreter so I wrote a little perl script and because this is sort of some glue between arc and wish I call it the awk to wish adhesive or I like to abbreviate that is aqua so here I've got the aqua interface between off and the key k interpreter and i'll just do 12 here again so 12 just says let's run this perl script doesn't look like anything's happened because i don't know how to sell pearl to make the application come forward down here in my doc this is an awk script running quicktime well there's no QuickTime movies here it's just an about box let's see if we can open a QuickTime movie this looks just like it did before because the graphical user interface portion of this is identical all that has changed is that I've taken a perfectly reasonable scripting language namely tickle and replace it with a perfectly ridiculous scripting language namely awk and again I can play this I've got the multi-level undo and redo I've got everything I had for ok that's pretty cool let me end with one last thing so actually Kevin talked about this yesterday in his session turns out that sometimes we want to operate on QuickTime movies but we don't necessarily want to actually display those movies so we may have a bunch of movies that we want to transcode into some other format or we may want to create a QuickTime movie from a bunch of still images I think we just saw this a few minutes ago John grabbed a bunch of images and he dragged him into his little app and it put them together into a movie but even there he was showing a GUI so what if I just had a whole bunch of images lying around on my desktop and I wanted to make a QuickTime movie out of them well I'm kind of slow so I thought jeez that's a wonderful solution i've just got I know that quicktime tickle has this command where i can add frames to a movie and it can create a new movie and it can write it out to disk so I'll use this great technology this aqua technology I've got and I'll write a quick time I'll write some sort of script that sends the TK commands over to quicktime tickle and suddenly I realize that's not what I want to do at all what I want to do is just write a command line tool that takes as its parameters the names of the files I want to use and creates the movie and let me just show you that here I've got an Xcode project but using H code is way overkill for this I could just do this all in the command line that's wonderful so it's real simple I've got an a main routine here it's got some arguments one nice thing about this script is I'm using the latest and greatest quicktime api's so I do a little checking on my the number of arguments i get i don't get the right number i'll print out some nasty warnings I'll call enter movies to initialize click time there's actually a step missing here that I don't have in theory quicktime likes to have a graphic support available when it's doing stuff even if I'm not going to display any QuickTime movies it's generally a good idea to have a graph court lying around so at this point I should call open Newport is that what it's called and have a port lying around turns out I've never crashed without it so let's not bother so the first thing I want to do is grab the first thing on the thought on the command line and do a CF string create with C string so you're giving me a C string on the command line and I'm going to get at CF string from that I want to see up string because there's this wonderful new quicktime data reference utility called cutie new data reference from CF from URL see of string and what that gives me back in its parameters is a data reference and the type of a data reference again a data reference is our standard way of referring to something on the disk or something out there on the internet or something somewhere once I've got a data reference I'm going to use this new quicktime storage API called create movie storage it takes the data ref and the data ref type it takes the type of file I want take some flags and it gives me back a data handler and a movie so now that I would just a few lines of code check it out what the output file should be called and created a movie I can loop over all the rest of the command line parameters which presumably our URLs to the images and I do sort of the same thing I get a CF string for the argument I get a data reference from it I'm going to open the image as a movie and I can do that with open movie storage get the movie finally when you do that when you open an image as a movie at least on Mac OS 10 the duration of that movie is I believe a fifth of a second that would be pretty small for the slideshow I want to build so I'm going to scale the movie segment from the movies that i just opened to some predefined duration finally I'm going to insert that segment that I just scaled up to be the right size into the movie that I created I'm going to do that for every image on the command line finally I'm going to update movie and storage which writes out the new movie and I'm done so here was about I don't know maybe 30 lines of fairly up-to-date quicktime api's i have a command-line tool that i can specify a whole bunch of image files to and then it will create a movie for me all right so let's go back to slides so that was the case study for command line tools so let me just wrap up I hope we've shown today that we've got a whole array of interesting sorts of tools that you can use to build quicktime apps not only GUI apps but also command line apps that it will do useful and interesting things many of these tools have very standard ways of extending them for instance real basic or revolution you can write plugins for if there are quicktime api's that they don't support natively and I really think that right now is the best time to be developing quicktime software and we've seen this conference really important new tools that quicktime coco kit the activex control and things like this that really brings us into the 21st century so you can contact John or me and let me just refer you to a couple of sources information mac tech magazine starting back in december of 2002 has had a nice series of articles about various quicktime programming environments so virtually everything that i've mentioned here today there will be at some point in this duration an article or two that describes how to do that and much more detail than we've had time to do here and also there are two new books out from morgan kaufmann that if you're doing any kind of QuickTime programming you really owe it to yourself to pick up there called quicktime toolkit vol 1 in quick time to get volume 2 and that brings us back to was it Twain's law that a man with a hammer sees everything is a nail there is the cover of the book