Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 16:13:39 -0700 From: Scott Addison Flowers <flowers@ecst.csuchico.edu> Subject: Re: Those moments of Lingo awakening (LONG)
I have found MIAWs to be quite useful as floating control-panel tools for presentations. In fact, I suspect their marriage to OOP Lingo would be, ahem, 'made in heaven' <sic>.
Before 4.0 came out, I had created literally hundreds of Director movies for my clients, who are professional presentors (i.e. globe-trotting digital nomads with a powerbook & projection system). Some of these movies are simple animations, others with varying levels of interactivity. I had been managing navigation via shared movie scripts (within Shared Casts). Likely something you would now control via birthing global OOP handlers.
Anyway, to the point, I created a global MIAW control movie (I call it my Global Sequencer) which resides on the (non-projected) powerbook screen. This MIAW, in turn, plays all other movies on the (projected) stage.
The Global Sequencer is used to create, load and save (via fileIO) sequences of the various Director Movies and QuickTime Movies (played within a specific Director movie). It also controls all inter-movie and intra-movie controls. It displays the current Movie with a popUp menu displaying the entire current sequence list. It also displays the label for the current (or previous) marker (i.e. marker(0)) with a popUp menu displaying the labelList. So the presenters may easily (and simply) skip forward or backwards x movies in the sequence, or x markers in the current movie. The Global Sequencer also provides controls for pause/continue, tempo and sound volume. Additionally, it ahs a button which launches an additional MIAW, which I call the Flip Chart, that facilitates extemporaneous brain-storming with the audience. Q&A fields and QT movies may be superimposed over the stage. It is intelligent, in that the sequencer will load specific data (i.e. specific text for the Q&A fields and/or specific QT movies) depending on the current movie/marker information). The presenters use this to engage the audience, soliciting their responses to the media presentation. The Flip Chart has additional controls (yet another MIAW) which reside hidden to the audience, on the powerbook screen. These include toggle the Q&A fields, toggle the QT movies, flip the page of the Flip Char forwards or backwards (File IO keeps track of many Q&A fields in a set), create a new, blank page, save the current flip chart text, Print out the Q&A fields, and so on.
And I did all of this using *traditional* Lingo, i.e. no PC structures, although a heavy use of lists. And I couldn't imagine doing it any other way (and keep it all manageable). I love MIAWs!