CompuServe Thread

Peter, A recent issue of AmigaWorld (July, I believe) had an extensive review of AmigaVision by Lou Wallace, who probably knows as much about AmigaVision as anyone you will find. Lou is the Senior Technical Editor of AmigaWorld, and is very knowledgeable about most Amiga topics (won't say all, because I don't really think anyone can cover all of the topics!) Lou has made a simple example for us, and had uploaded it – but it seems to be lost in the shuffle here. I have it on disk, and will re-upload it in the next day or so. Examples for AMigaVision will be put in Library 8 here in AmigaTech. We have had two or three submissions, but they are just beginning to come in. I think you will find AV to be delightful. I have it – know little about it yet, but find it extremely easy to put things together with it. When combined with CanDo from Innovatronics, you can do even more. They make a nice pair. .Betty

Peter: I'm not sure that there is a very straightforward way to cross develop this sort of thing between Amiga and MAC. But, not being knowledgeable in cross development, I'll leave that to others. My personal experience with AmigaVision is moderate — i.e. I have had it about two weeks, and am astill palying with it. But here's a quick run down: AmigaVision permits you to integrate CD still and video, the four-channel/8-bit internal sound capabilities of the Amiga, MIDI external sound/light & other systems, genlocked video, internal graphics and animation, Amiga's built-in computer speech functions, mouse, keyboard, joystick and/or touch screen input into full interactive informative, educational and/or entertainment presentations/applications. AmigaVision also has built-in data base capabilities generally compatible with DBase-style data. My own work with it to date has not used the MIDI, CD, video, touchscreen, or joy stick capabilities. However, I have made all the other things mentioned work, and work well, so I would imagine those capabilties are equally sound. There are a few things you should know about the Amiga to understand how powerful the AmigaVision environment can be: 1) Amiga still graphics, sound and animation each have a somewhat "universal" file format. Still graphics are about 90% compatible among paint, manipulation and viewing software, sound about 80% and animations maybe 50% (in that the animation area is where the most work is going on to find faster and/or less memory intensive ways of doing things in real time). However, in every area, there are numerous tools available to take this to virtually 100% compatibility. Thus, it is very easy to "tweak" each of these elements for a presentation. 2) The Amiga multitasks very easily and flexibly. That means that if you have a utility that handles something "better" than AmigaVision in a particular instance, you can issue a command from within AmigaVision which runs that utility in the background. In other words, AmigaVision can be a [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] backbone for the integration of virtually any of your software into the application. 3) With AREXX, an interprocess communications and control environment this is currently thrid party software at about $50, but is an integral part of the version 2.0 operating system just now coming out from Commodore, you not only can run other software as if it were an AmigaVision module, you can control and communicate with it, and, indeed, have several pieces of software runnign which also control and communicate with each other. AmigaVision has AREXX capabilities, and many other Amiga commercial and shareware programs also have it. It is likely to become virtually mandatory for Amiga software very quickly. In addition, there is a program called Scripit available here on CI$ which can control non-AREXX software from interactive scripts, and which itself is AREXX compatible, so you can integrate somewhere near 90% of Amiga software into custom applications environments if you like (provided, or course, you have the memory to do so:). OK. AmigaVision's interface is very easy to use. It's working area is a grid. You literally create a symbol-based flow-chart on that grid as you build a presentation/application. You do this by dragging various icon-symbols onto the grid from a set of menus which run accross the bottom of the screen. There are sets of icons for logic control, interrupts, data i/o/manipulation, various kinds of delay and/or waiting for mouse, touchscreen and/or keyboard input, audio/visual output of all kinds, and basic module types (you can create various subroutines in detail, and then "consolidate" them into modules — sortof like structured programming). When you click on a symbol on the grid, generally a dialogue box comes up which lets you select various things — the animation, sound or screen file you want to use, for example (with an easy-to use file selector built right in); transitions; speed; placement of data into a variable; etc. There is a [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] built in editor which permits you to create hot spots for mouse input, either invisible (for over a graphic), outlined, with text inside, or using a "brush" (i.e. a small graphic created in a paint program which is layered over the background text), and you can have a mouse click change the brush as part of its operation. (BTW — you can substitute "touch screen" or "keyboard" for any mouse input statements here). Now, as powerful and easy to use as it is, AmigaVision is not the end-all hyper/multi-media tool all by itself. For example, there are things (like with text file viewing, manipulation and integration) where AmigaVision is a bit more limited than I like. No problem! CanDo (another hyper/multi-media application) has that (and it's cheap — you can get AREXX, AmigaVision AND CanD0 for about $250 total street price). Since CAnDO has AREXX capabilities, AmigaVision and CanDO can toss the ball back and forth, as needed, for example. Let's put some of this together. I made a demo about the AMiga. It has a three minute intro where a four voice musical score plays over a series of graphics/text screens, using all kinds of neat wipes, moving brushes (and one real-time full screen animation), etc. which deal in a general way with the Amiga's abilities. This ends with a screen depicting eight buttons, each of which is a 3.5" floppy disk with a graphic tied to DTP, Video, Games, Music etc. (the words are also under each). AT the top it says "click a disk to learn more". If you click the music one, for example, you get a new screen with buttons that, if clicked, review various kinds of software (showing screen shots, and with an Amiga computer-voice-over talking about what it does, and naming similar software from other suppliers). There is a second set of bottons you can click to hear four-voice musical scores — a rock one, classical one, and pop one. If you click one of those, it plays, and a text box comes up describing the source of the tune, its arranger, and which AMiga [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] software created it. There is a "quit" button to use if you don't want to hear the whole thing. If you clicked dtp, you would get a series of screen shots, with music played over, that told you the Amiga DTP story through the text being used on the DTP screen shots. When it was finished, you were back to the main screen. That's more than you probably wanted to know ;^]. And, it only scratches the surface. Any questions, I'll be happy to try to answer. ?|^] Ray Lewis

Peter: BTW — I live in Brooklyn, NY, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. If you happen to live anywhere near, I'd be ahppy to actually show you what I've been doing with AmigaVision. It's a lot easier than trying to describe it! ?|^] Ray Lewis

Peter, see my answer to your message over in Arts. Ben Caxton (still disguised as:) Victor A. Wagner, Jr.

Peter, if you have access to an Amiga I'd really recommend getting it and learning by doing, cause it's not going to be the easiest to explain. However I'll do the best I can. It is an authoring system aimed directly at multimedia applications (such as kiosks). However, instead of using a direct programming language, ala hypercard, you flow-chart your ideas using icons. Each icon in the flow chart, when double clicked on, opens up a details-requester which allows you to set the specifics for the icon. Examples of icons are display-screen, speak, while-loop and control-laserdisc. AmigaVision provides direct support for many important programming commands, but if you really need something done hardcore programming, or you need to communicate with other programs, there is ARexx. (this opens up a whole new can of worms) ARexx is the standard scripting language on the Amiga. Many programs support it directly, along with AmigaDOS. ARexx also allows you to pass messages between various multitasking programs. Many programs make all of their functions available via ARexx commands, such as DigiPaint3 and CygnusEd. I have not yet played with ARexx in AmigaVision, but I'd imagine that you can send arexx commands to programs, run scripts and receive messages. — Ethan