The interplay between Keynote and iWeb has been taking up the lion’s share of my creative activities of late. But, I don’t want this to be just an iWork/iLife lovefest! There are several other programs that I think deserve attention as well, and what better way to tell you than to SHOW you? :)

If you’ve been in the QuickTime scene for some time, then you may be aware that the top dog beyond compare of programs used to make QuickTime sit up and beg (and then stream the video of it) is LiveStage Pro from Totally Hip Technologies. Just taking a look at what it can do (and knowing that Apple uses it a lot for their interactive web pages) you can almost TASTE the impressive things you can do with this. Then, you get to the price. I won’t spoil it, you’ll see it when you get there. Suffice it to say that’s it’s out of the range of your average QuickTime tinkerer. Wouldn’t it be great if there was something that was kinda sorta like this but maybe just not as expensive? Wouldn’t you be willing to relieve yourself of some of the higher end features (like being able to code sprites) if you could shave off some of the cost yet still make an interactive QuickTime movie? Let’s add “making your own buttons” to the list of “gotta-haves” too, why don’t we?

To say I was happy when, a few years ago, I came across eZediaQTI would be an understatement. Even at version 1, I could do so much more than I could with QuickTime Pro, far easier than it would be with Adobe GoLive, for a lot less than LiveStage. And now, it’s only $49.99, well into version 2, and is more smileworthy than ever. Using the earlier versions, I took it for a spin and I prepared two examples that, for now, I’ll link to on my old homepage site. The first one uses eZedia’s method of creating media skins, BUT with a twist. As the video is loading in the upper right, you have access to a button labeled “Greenery”. Clicking on it changes the background from a blue-skied highway to a lush forest (the kind of place where you might find a Mystic or two... or 11). Clicking the “Blue Sky” button will switch you back and you can even do this while watching the movie. For the movie controls, you get Play/Pause, Rewind and an “X” used to close the window. It’s a fairly large area to only use that small space for the video, but since the background changes, it’s ok :)

The second also uses eZedia’s media skin method but not one of the themes downloaded from their site. I used a decent resolution image of a PSP to construct my own skin. Then, instead of creating image buttons, I just created buttons with no image attached to them so that you would seem to click the buttons on the actual PSP (and click on the word “POWER” to turn it off or close it). For the images IN the PSP, that’s another movie that I created with LiveSlideShow which I simply MUST remember to introduce you to someday. Some of the buttons used for the interface are not listed, so click around and see what does what.

Finally, at the bottom of that page is an example of a Media Link. This is what you use when you want to use a text link instead of a poster movie like the two examples above it. One downside of this method is that each time you click it, a .qtl file gets downloaded to your computer. Another thing is that it doesn’t always work in Windows (but this may be related to known issues with QuickTime 7 for Windows). With those two things going against it, you won’t see it too often, but I put it out there for people who’d like to see an example of one.