Introduction

[Steven W. Riggins]

>Steve - Is there any chance of you doing something like that magnificent
>Voyager product, the Voyager Expandeed Book Toolkit on Revolution?

EBT was done by Colin Holgate and Brock LaPorte.  I was on other 
projects at the time but I gave em hell now and then :)

At Night Kitchen we built a tool, TK3, to create Expanded Books 
(http://www.nightkitchen.com/) but it is not scriptable, etc.  ie, it 
is designed specifically as a closed system, for people who just want 
to make books that run on Mac and Windows.

I talked with someone at Mac World (I am horrible with names, Kevin 
was it?) about building tools in Revolution.  The issue that comes 
into play is that any tool would have to be thought of as a plugin - 
the author would need to own Revolution and my plugin.

Back in the day (lordy, I can say that now, how depressing), we were 
trying to sell cheap toolkits.  I guess these days, people are 
willing to pay.  (or they can forego the Revolution cost if they only 
want to create short 10 line or less scripts I hear)


>I was also interested in knowing if it is possible to control a DVD
>player in the way that you could control a videodisk in HyperCard?

Not that I am aware of.  Due to licences, even playing DVD off of a 
drive is problematic without rolling your own DVD playback engine 
(feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I have not looked into this 
in a few years)

As for physical control, none of my players have any sort of 
interface, not even the cheesy serial remote connection that our 
"Box" connected to.  And having had to write the externals to control 
that beast cloaked in black metal, I don't know if I have any hair 
left to tackle that again.  Wait, I'm bald, so I am sure I don't.  :)

I had this box that a company of Wozniak's was working on in the 80s, 
a universal remote that had a serial interface.  I had rolled a 
version of my videodisc externals to talk to the beast and send IR 
codes, haha.  It was one way of course, but it worked, sorta.  Then 
QuickTime came along and changed the world.

It would be great to be able to do something akin to Beethoven, which 
was buying an off the shelf CD and then controlling it, thus 
annotating it, via the computer.  It is too bad the MPAA is so 
worried about theft (rightly so, I suppose) that we have lost that 
point of entry in the DVD field.


>Let me also add my welcome.

Thank you!
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Steve Riggins, Macintosh Geek                     http://www.geeksrus.com/