Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!eecae!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!ranjit
From: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (R. Bhatnagar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Animator with an AREXX Port?
Message-ID: <6338@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 24 Nov 88 05:26:34 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (R. Bhatnagar)
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Organization: University of Pennsylvania
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Do there exist any animation playback tools - on the order of The
Director - that have an AREXX port?  Or any fairly good ANIM players
that are available in source form so someone could add external control?
All I really want to do is be able to synchronize the start of an
animation with some sort of external signal, but I can imagine
that something like The Director with an AREXX port could have 
applications so nifty that one's niftometer would need recalibration.
(A database, word processor, and animator linked together with 
a nice AREXX kernel could put Hypercard to shame...)

Oh yeah, that reminds me of an idea I had.  What do you think of
a generic user interface?  That is, a program which allows you to
graphically manipulate menus, buttons, dialogs, etc. and attach
them to arbitrary AREXX scripts.  This would allow one to build 
custom user interfaces to at least some of the features of AREXX
capable software (some things would still be best handled by
custom code, of course), and would also allow one to develop software
without any user interface at all, and then add the interface later.
Any number of such programs could be operated by one integrated
interface; such custom interfaces could be traded on the net like
hypercard stacks.  Question: is it good AREXX style to pass private
data like window structures around, so that a user interface could
ask a program whether it has a custom window/screen, and if so, use
it?

Of course, I don't even own AREXX yet, so I don't have any idea
what I'm talking about.

	- Ranjit


   
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