Introduction to Interactive Movies

This book is a developer’s guide to building and developing interactive QuickTime movies with wired sprites and sprite animation, and is part of Apple’s Inside QuickTime: Technical Reference Library. It is intended primarily for content authors, Webmasters, and tool developers who need to understand the fundamentals of QuickTime interactivity and, specifically, how they can incorporate wired movies, sprites, sprite animation, and Flash into their own applications.

This book supersedes all existing documentation, including Programming With Wired Movies and Sprite Animation. It extends the content in those volumes and brings it up to date with the current release of QuickTime.

For information about building and developing interactive QuickTime movies with QuickTime VR, refer to the volume Interactive Movies: QuickTime VR.

The book is written as a companion volume to the QuickTime API Reference and supplements the latest documentation and updates to QuickTime that are available at: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Quicktime/QuickTime.html

Organization of This Document

The book is divided into the following chapters:

Conventions Used in This Book

This book provides various conventions to present information. Words that require special treatment appear in specific fonts or font styles. Certain types of information use special fonts so that you can scan them quickly.

Special Fonts

All code listings, reserved words, and the names of actual data structures, constants, fields, parameters, and functions are shown in Letter Gothic (this is Letter Gothic).

Words that appear in boldface are key terms or concepts that are defined in the glossary.

Types of Notes

There are several types of notes used in this book.

Development Environment

The functions described in this book are available using C interfaces. How you access them depends on the development environment you are using.

Code listings in this book are shown in ANSI C. They suggest methods of using various functions and illustrate techniques for accomplishing particular tasks. Although most code listings have been compiled and tested, Apple Computer Inc., does not intend for you to use these code samples in your application.

Updates to This Book

For any online updates to this book, check the QuickTime developers’ page on the World Wide Web at: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/QuickTime/index.html

See Also

For information about membership in Apple’s developer program, you should go to this URL: http://developer.apple.com/membership

For Technical Support: http://developer.apple.com/technicalsupport/index.html

For information on registering signatures, file types, and other technical information, contact

Macintosh Developer Technical Support Apple Computer, Inc. 1 Infinite Loop, M/S 303-2T Cupertino, CA 95014