Flipbook_v1.0

Flipbook v1.0

By Nigel Tromans

Introduction.

Flipbook is a Hollywood application to display bitmap slides with an optional
audio commentry on all or selected slides. The slides may be stepped through by
the user or displayed as a slide-show with a variable rate of display. Versions
are provided for AROS, AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4, MorphOS, Windows, Mac OSX ppc and Mac
OSX x86 (please note the AmigaOS4, MorphOS and Mac versions are untested by me).
It was created as an educational tool to show worked examples of questions in a
more active format, and included in the archive are a couple of examples of
this, both relevant to advanced level Physics, one a projectile motion example
and the other turning moments, but it could be used for any subject or indeed
just to display your hoilday pictures if you wanted an audio commentary on each!

Usage.

Simply ceate a directory which contains the sldies to be displayed (which should
be named slide.1, slide.2, etc, maximum 999 slides), any audio files associated
with a slide (named audio.x, where x is the slide number associated with the
audio file; each slide does not need an audio file, so for example you could
have just audio.3 and audio.10 to be played with the 3rd and 10th slides
respectively). The slides must be in a bitmap format that Hollywood understands
or there is a datatype for (e.g. ILBM or PNG) and the audio file in .AIFF or
.WAV format (unfortunately not mp3 as AROS Hollywood does not support that audio
format).

The slides can be any size you wish but all slides must have the same size. The
size of the display window is set as follows:

- If a config file is present (see below), the display window will be set to the
size set in it provided it is not bigger than the screen dimensions or is too
small for the controls.

- With no config file present, the display window will be set to the size of the
slides provided it is not bigger than the screen dimensions or is too small for
the controls.

- If the display window would be bigger than the screen dimensions, it is scaled
down to fit within the screen.

- If the display would be less than 200 pixels, it is scaled to this width to
give space for the control gadgets.

- The display window may be scaled by the user.

- All scalings maintain the aspect ratio of the slides.

At the bottom of the display is the control bar. At the left and right of this
are the step arrows - when paused, press these to step one slide forward or
back. The step arrows are disabled when the slides are being played in a
slideshow. Next to the left step arrow is the play arrow - click to play and it
will be replaced with a pause gadget, which of course is clicked to pause. Next
to this the rate of display (in s) is given; this may be altered by pressing the
up and down arrows next to it or clicking on the gadget to enter the rate
directly into a requester (min. 1 s, max. 999 s). Next is the speaker gadget -
click to mute any audio. After this is the slide number gadget - when paused,
click on this to enter a slide to view into a requester. A help bubble will pop
up for all controls if the mouse is paused over them for 5 s.

The rate of diaplay of slides has an internal default of 20 s per slide, but the
rate and the display window resolution may be set by including a flipbook.config
file in the same directory as the slides, audio and excutable. The config file
is a simple ascii file and has the format:

#WIDTH
width-value
#HEIGHT
height-value
#RATE
rate-value

The entries do not need to be in this order and not every entry needs to be
included, e.g. just the #RATE entry could be present. Within the settings of the
#WIDTH and #HEIGHT (if both are present) the scaling still maintains the aspect
ratio (scaled to the smallest factor from #WIDTH and #HEIGHT).

If a slide has an audio file, the playing of this will override the rate
setting, i.e. the slide will be displayed until the audio has completed. To
curtail this, the speaker could be set to mute or the playing of the slides
paused.

When playing, when the slideshow reaches the last slide it then begins again
from the start.

Tip: when creating the slides, either render using antialias or render at a
higher resolution than you finally want and then scale down using antialias to
give a less jaggly result.