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Title:
Discovering QuickTime: An Introduction for Windows&Mac Prog
Author:
George Towner
ISBN:
0 12 059640 7
Publisher:
Morgan Kaufmann
Pages:
515pp+CD
Price:
£25-95
Reviewer:
Joe McCool
Subject:
multimedia
Appeared in:
12-3
With version 4 of Quicktime, Apple have come up with a
powerful and stylish application for multi-media development,
including fully streaming video over the Internet and this book is
certainly a very useful guide to its use and implementation. The
book is divided into two main sections, with part one covering the
basic ideas behind Quicktime and presenting a series of step by step
programming examples. Part two details coding techniques for more
serious application development, including special effects and VR.
Experienced developers are well served by the excellent overview of
the technology for both the Mac and Windows environments, while the
more casual reader will find the explanations on how Quicktime is
constructed and implemented in part one very useful.
Like Quicktime 4 itself, however, there are some drawbacks with this
book. Strangely, there is no mention of the integration of Quicktime
with Macromedia's widely used Director application and nothing on
the exciting possibilities of using Quicktime with Macromedia's
excellent Flash 4. Although the CD included with the book does
contain source code and demonstration programmes which show off the
capabilities of Quicktime, strangely, it doesn't contain Quicktime
itself, so you'll need to download Quicktime 4 [free] fromhttp://www.apple.com/quicktime/and here's where the
major problems arise. Downloading has been proving difficult or well
nigh impossible from the main Apple site, or even from local
mirrors. A nuisance for developers, but a commercial disaster for
Apple as web authors aren't going to use the technology, if the
general public can't access the necessary 'plug-in'.