There's a short MacWEEK article on QuickTime Interactive and HyperCard, which is essentially an overview of the WWDC session last week on "QuickTime: Beyond 3.0". You can watch the full session yourself (as long as you have a PowerPC), at the Interactive Media Track at a Glance page of the WWDC 1997 Webcast site. (This is the last week that the webcasts will be available).
Apple has released the QuickTime VR 2.0.1 system extension, which you can find in the Developer section of the QuickTime VR site. We're not sure what's new about it.
For those daring souls that are dying to start creating 3D QuickTime tracks, there's a "primitive" PPC-only tool available, created by Bill Meikle, which enables you to create a QuickTime movie from a QuickDraw 3D model. The tool allows you to define the "tween" track, which is what controls the way the model behaves over time. The tool is called "TweenScene", and is available at the Deep Forest Multimedia Home Page.
Jon Summers has two new QTVR tools out this week. One is a plug-in for MoviePlayer that displays info about the VR movie (after installing, choose Get Info from the Movie menu, then choose QTVR version from the right pop-up) and allows you to switch nodes and warp setting from pop-ups. To our knowledge, this is the first non-Apple plug-in for MoviePlayer. Summer's other tool is ReverseVR, which turns a panoramic QTVR movie back into a single panoramic image. Both tools can be found at the VRtools download page.
We hope some of you have gotten the chance to look at the WebCasts for last week's Developer Conference. We have had trouble accessing the WebCast site (http://wwdc.smgtv.net/) so far this week. We did, however, get to see the QuickTime Overview session where Peter Hoddie, QuickTime Architect and Jim Batson, the Wizard of Quick & Time, did a nice overview of QuickTime 3.0 and touched on QuickTime 4 or QTi (QuickTime Interactive). The WebCasts are supposed to be available until May 31st; let's hope they fix the web site soon.
MacWEEK covers news and info from Developers conference in an article titled "Apple looks to OS future"; it has a few tidbits of interesting info, like HFS Plus, a new file system that gets rid of the the 2-gigbyte file size limitation that has haunted those who want to work with large movies. There's also info abou system level support for DVD, as well as some QuickTime info.
In the May 6th MacInTouch column in MacWEEK, Ric Ford covers a number of issues involving MPEG CD playback.
Interactive Solutions has yet another new beta version (b8) of MovieWorks Interactive at the MovieWorks Download page.
We hope to see Terran Interactive's Media Cleaner Pro 2.0, shipping this week.
This week is Apple's World Wide Developer Conference, and for the first time, they'll be broadcasting sessions. Go to the WWDC 1997 WebCast Main Page for basic info on access and software needed. You can browse around, but eventually find yourself at the Interactive Media Track at a Glance page, to see the list of QuickTime-related talks that will be broadcast. (The "QuickTime: Beyond 3.0" session covers interactivity and HyperCard/QuickTime integration.)
Panimation is taking orders for Nodester 1.0, , their easy-to-use $169 tool for creating QuickTime VR panoramas (without Apple's QuickTime VR Authoring Tools), but you can still get a beta version at the Download Nodester Preview page.
A few updates this week:
Interactive Solutions has a new beta version (b6) of MovieWorks Interactive at the MovieWorks Download page. (There's a little more info at Little QT Page 4/22.)
Connectix has an update to VideoPhone, their QuickTime-based video-conferencing software, bringing Videophone to version 2.0.1. Get it at Connectix's Updater page.
And, Macromedia has an update to their Deck II audio editing software; the update, which can be found at the Deck II Updates page will update current versions to 2.6.