Woah, he's brought us to this volcano. So let's get rid of him, whoosh.
So these things here are robot parts, and I can grab them, and stick them together, like that, just kind of like Legos, sort of.
And these again were defined in Director. I'll pop over to Director.
This is how you define them. It's just: you have the animations in the timeline, and you have the names you want to give them up here as labels, and you can put sounds in, and then these things here are the registraton points: neck, left shoulder, left leg.
So you just take the cast, you put in rectangles for the places you want to plug things in, you just stick them down on the stage, and just do that for every frame, and then you've got yourself an animation, and then you load it into the Director importer, and then you can do things like, just stick stuff together.
Let's see... Or you could make a more conventional robot. This is your avitar construction kit. Once you get them all together, he's very happy.
So, what is this good for? As Negroponte says, Direct Manipulation is only good for driving and sex. We need some other interfaces, and this is a multiple metaphor system. What in the world just happened? Umm, I think the gravity warped.
That little N, the NetScape icon you saw there, is a dynamically loaded part that gives us an interface to NetScape. I'm running NetScape locally, and now I have the ability to open a URL, call it "scriptx:hello".
OK, this is talking to the ScriptX locally, that's dynamically generating HTML, and I can just click on the button, and that links back to "scriptx:help". All these services are registered.
There's a class browser. It just looks at the classes that are in memory, and generates a web page to describe it, that you wouldn't want to have to write yourself.
And all this nasty HTML. Come on BBEdit! And all the HTML just links back into ScriptX, and it's all programatically generated. And the cool thing is that these HTML things are like Collections, they're very easy to manipulate in ScriptX. You just say "for i in interestingThings do collect a link to i as WebBulletedList". And you've got this bulleted list. Here's a LinearCollection.
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