Contributions to AMS
AutoPlay Media Studio is a multimedia development environment, made by Indigo Rose Software. The software can be expanded with plugins to widen even further the possibilities of what can be achieved with the already fantastic piece of software.
My contributions for AMS comprehend:
Plugins
Shape Transition Plugin (freeware)
This is a page transition plugin, which allows to show the next page as a growing circle or square from the center of the page, or as a shrinking circle or square to the center. Links: project, plugin, forum.
Click image for online demo
PageTurn Transition Plugin (freeware)
This was my first page transition plugin, which can be used to mimic the page turn/flip effect. Links: project, plugin, forum.
Click image for online demo
FTPS Action Plugin (freeware)
A free action plugin, that will enable the developer to connect to SSL/TLS-secured FTP servers to transfer files. FTPS is not the same as FTP over a SSH channel. Links: plugin, forum.
ODBC Database Action Plugin (donationware)
With this action plugin, the developer will be able to connect to any database, local or remote, with a corresponding ODBC driver. The plugin enables the developer to run queries, retrieve and set data, etc. The plugin can be freely distributed, but in the IDE nag screens will be shown, which can be suppressed for a very reasonable donation of US$ 10 for my work to develop and debug this software. Links: plugin, forum.
Skin Action Plugin (donationware)
With this action plugin, the developer will be able to apply skins to the window frame and controls of the application developed with AMS. Very different looking skins can be found by the hundreds on the internet. The plugin can be freely distributed, but in the IDE nag screens will be shown, which can be suppressed for a donation of US$ 20 for investement in development time, software and work. Links: plugin.
Click image for online demo
Example projects
In addition to my contributions to the forums, I developed some sample projects which can serve as further inspiration to your own works. Feel free to study them and see how things were done, improve them or reuse the code in your projects. Comments are welcome, click here.
Xeyes
Here is a version of the classic Xeyes mouse-tracking demo from years ago, built using AutoPlay Media Studio. The custom-shaped application will sit on your desktop, and a pair of eyes will follow the movement of your mouse while you do other things. In this project you will see how to mask a window, how to track the mouse, move the window on the screen without it having a visible title bar, and how to move images. The eyes will be displayed on the same position were you left them on the previous run. Links: forum, project.
Weather Forecast
This project was done to assist a user to fetch weather information from a web site, parse the received HTML, and present the data in a application built with AutoPlay Media Studio. You will see how to download a web page, search for strings in it and extract some data, and then display the information using images and labels. Links: forum, project.
Multilanguage project
Here I show how to exchange the text of various objects on the pages of a project, allowing to change the language of the application on-the-fly. This is a skeleton project, not all objects and plugins available to AMS are supported, but once you see how things were done, you will be able to implement any missing elements you may need. Links: forum, project.
RSS Forum Reader
This example shows how to retrieve a XML document, and parse the data. Then, the data is written to disk to be presented as a HTML file in a Web Object. A CSS is created to format the document for a pleasant presentation. Links: forum, project.
Transparent Web Object
This example shows how to mimic a transparent Web Object on top of the background image. Web Objects are not transparent, but with a little CSS "magic", window masking and a bit of HTML rewriting, the background image is used as well in the Web Object, blending into the background seamlessly. Links: forum, project.
AutoPlay Media Studio is a trademark of Indigo Rose Software Design Corporation. All other trademarks and registered trademarks eventually mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.