December 2008

Zorap, Web-Based Video Chat
Zorap web pages are multi-party multimedia environments. Video from your webcam and audio from your microphone, photos, music and video from your own computer are shared to tens of your friends via a Zorap Server. Web content, including YouTube and other video sites are similarly shared, all in an exciting and customizable drag-and-drop interface.

Electric Magic implemented the Mac-specific portions of the Zorap web plugin, supporting Safari, Firefox and other modern web browsers.

May 2006

Knowledge Forum 4.6
Knowledge Forum 4.6's minor version number change belies just how different from its predecessor it really is.

Under the hood KF 4.6 has moved from using ZDBase for its backing store, instead using a tuplebase. This makes it possible to split HTML page generation into separate processes, potentially running on multiple front end machines. It also restores support for a rich client application, now written in Java, using ZTSoup to efficiently communicate changes in the tuplebase, whether made by other clients or by the web interface.

August 2003

Knowledge Forum 4.5
Knowledge Forum 4.5 was a significant refinement of Knowledge Forum 4.0, with a much richer web interface, although still constrained by the need to support Netscape 4.x-era web browsers.

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May 2003

ZDCPixmapBlit

ZDCPixmapBlit uses templates to generate the code for source/destination and source/matte/destination blitting, matte/destination filling, and destination-only munging, using the four Porter/Duff composition operators Copy, Over, In and Plus.

November 2002

Web Browser Plugins
ZooLib's UI code requires only that there be a ZFakeWindow-derivative at the top of the enclosure hierarchy. In the distant past ZooLib included implementations of ZFakeWindow for Mac control panel cdevs, HyperCard XCMD windows, MacroMind Director XObject windows, Zoom closures, MacApp views and of course still does for ZOSWindows.

It was thus relatively straightforward to implement ZFakeWindow_NSPlugin, which translates between the Netscape browser plugin and the ZFakeWindow APIs. What was actually more difficult was finding a decent implementation of the plugin glue code and header files. In 2002 there wasn't anything that would work with current compilers and with current browsers, so most of the effort was in putting together ZNSPlugin, which is a usable implementation of the glue.

October 2002

ZDC_ZooLib: Portable Graphics

ZooLib defines and implements a graphics API that produces identical results across all supported platforms. It is geared towards creating user interface elements and so is pixel-based rather than geometric so that a programmer can know precisely which pixels will be touched by a drawing operation. It supports pixel-plotting, lines of any thickness, text, rectangles, rounded rectangles, ovals, arbitrary regions and the drawing of masked-pixmaps. ZDC_ZooLib is an implementation of this API using no OS facilities at all, and thus can be used in server applications without the difficulties that normally poses (gaining access to a window or graphics server from a low-privilege process).

The implementation uses operations on ZBigRegion instances to decide which pixels to touch, decomposes the regions into rectangles and then calls ZDCPixmapBlit to actually do the work.

December 2000

ZooLib
ZooLib is an Open Source (MIT License) C++ library that makes it easy to write one set of source and build an application for Windows, Mac and UNIX. It provides a foundation suite of facilities that in essence form a virtual operating system API, and wide range of higher-level facilities that build on that foundation.

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January 2000

Knowledge Forum 3.0
Knowledge Forum 3.0 took advantage of major enhancements in ZooLib that let the client be released for Windows as well as Mac OS. Much of Knowledge Forum 2.0 had been built around the Mac-only Zoom framework, and so had to be reimplemented. The parts of Knowledge Forum 2.0 built with ZooLib were simply carried forward, with refinements and enhancements.

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August 1999

NPainter

NPainter is a suite of classes that provides a MacPaint-like interface, but supporting indexed and true color, across all platforms supported by ZooLib.

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May 1999

Windoids: Windows Within Windows...

Measurement in Motion 1.0 had an interesting interface. A document contained a set of measurements, and various objects that could display and modify those measurements. The objects were represented as 'windoids', windows within the document window. MiM 1.0 was a Mac application, so the windoids could depend only on ZooLib's graphics API, with no help from the OS. When demand for a Windows version became overwhelming I implemented a full windowing system that conformed to ZooLib's ZOSWindow API, so that any code that worked within a regular OS window could instead be hosted in a windoid. QuickTime by this point was writing to the screen buffer asynchronously, so any change in the visible region of a windoid is notified before it happens and after its completed, somewhat like the BeOS BDirectWindow mechanism.

August 1998

ZBigRegion

In porting ZooLib to BeOS I found that BeOS's region API was missing key features. Exclusive or and equivalence testing could be handled by composing more primitive operations, but insetting was trickier. So I dug through the X source and found that their implementation of insetting was totally generic, basically shifting the source region for each set bit in the inset distance and accumulating a union (for expanding) or intersection (for contracting).

But BRegion was also quite slow. The internal representation was pretty close to that used by the X code, being a list of non-overlapping rectangles organized into bands. BRegion did not always maintain the same tight constraints as the X code, but it still proved possible to significantly improve performance by manipulating BRegion's internal data using the X code.

By this point I was intimately familiar with X regions and it was a small step to take the X source and rework it, the result being ZBigRegion - a portable region implementation using 32 bit coordinates. Combined with ZDCPixmapBlit it forms the basis of ZDC_ZooLib.

August 1997

Knowledge Forum 2.0
Knowledge Forum 2.0 is a computer supported collaboration environment designed to foster the growth of knowledge building communities. It's based on the CSILE project, developed at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and is published by published by Learning in Motion.

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January 1994

Measurement in Motion
Measurement in Motion is a pioneering math and science analysis and investigation tool. It lets students take measurements from real-world video footage, then tabulate, graph and derive secondary measurements from their data. Conversely, students can generate data algorithmically and superimpose it over video to provide visceral confirmation of hypothesized behavior.

November 1992

Marrakech

Marrakech took the hypermedia concepts I explored in WorkSpace and applied them to the problem of managing workflow and assets for multimedia development.

June 1992

Creative Whack Pack
The Creative Whack Pack was a software version of Roger von Oech's famous creativity-enhancing deck of cards. Scott Kim collaborated with Roger on the application's design, which had some neat features including a system-wide hot-key that would bring up a random card, a click on which would seamlessly invoke the application. The app's window also showed animated transitions between screens (dissolve, rotate etc).

June 1990

MediaMaker
MediaMaker was a ground-breaking application that provided a Finder-like interface to manage multimedia content, coupled with a timeline for assembling that content into a finished production. It controlled laserdisc players, VCRs and CD-ROM drives, managed video overlay cards, played AIFF files (no mp3s back then), MacroMind Director presentations and displayed PICT files (no JPEG either).

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June 1985

Almazz
Almazz is another Commodore 64 game. This time I had the benefit of the Zoom monitor program, and a macro assembler whose name I forget. Technically Almazz was ahead of the pack, featuring a playing environment 1700 screens in size (8192 x 8192 pixels), with a 2 ½ D view letting you see your Indiana Jones-esque player walk in front of and behind trees, bushes, huts, rocks, obelisks and water fountains.

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June 1984

Bug Squad
Bug Squad is a 'Centipede' clone for the Commodore 64. It started as a BASIC program with machine code only for time-sensitive portions, and over the time the BASIC scaffolding got replaced until it was all machine code. Unlike the PET there was no built-in monitor program, so I used a snippet of BASIC that took hex and wrote it to memory, or took memory and dumped it out as hex. The downside being that to this day when I see A9 XX, or 8D XX XX I can't help but read 'Load Accumulator Immediate', or 'Store Accumulator Absolute'.

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