World: r3wp

Carl showed me once an old 486 he made do full motion, full color 
interactive television with a simple vanilla VGA card...

Depends on the target customer.

Steve: I am not sure I agree on Scala part. Until View parts are 
opened and more multimedia friendly, so better sync is possible, 
I will not use rebol for presentation. Still single Scala demo can 
cause wow effect when showing it to ppl in comparison to whatever 
else - I want smoothness, and that is unachievable using Rebol

well, then others will beat you to it.

Besides that - the question is, if using rebol for presentation is 
good thing - imagine some company will want to deliver its content 
themselves. Better let's prepare for deployment - someone will give 
you Scala presentation, someone flash one, someone .avi, etc. My 
idea is to be able to interface players (e.g. call it from shell, 
should be enough)

Typical Scala systems cost between $500 (CPU), $650 (Scala License), 
and $$$$ for the LCD (A 50" can cost $10K).

You don't need scala licence, no? I thought they have player, which 
is free of charge?

No. Free Player. At least not until last year. I had all the reseller 
docs, but didn't become one. As I thought we could build something 
similar, and a lot cheaper.

LCD cost is the biggest problem imo ... still most LCDs are really 
badly visible during the day. We investigate destroying one and produce 
high bright, adding some additional lamps into it ....

BTW. I think rebol can be used for making a product similar to Scala. 
Using the proper libraries to control WMP or Quicktime. Rebol will 
be in charge on syncing with the Contente Manager, and Scheduling 
the Player.

Rebol will always be weak on smooth scrolling thing. It uses double 
buffering and it still can't compare even at 10% to what Scala is 
able to do fast and smooth ...

Steve is right - if Cyphre or anyone else would build a Authoring 
tool for media rebol, it would be killer app ...

You can do basic ad quality multimedia with View now.

But we need queality of output, which View does not have. AGG is 
big step forward, but for vectors ... I want transitions though and 
that is - I want pixel VM or other goodie. But imo without some kernel 
changes, we will never be smooth enough.

Pekr, I always will have a warm spot in my heart for Scala, it's 
landed me some great work.  BTW, 90% of the presentations were done 
with 100% REBOL tools, mostly some various global dialects...only 
a few legacy .ppt junk showed up.  But cool thing, most REBOLers 
had improved upon the presentation code.

Through a big processor at it. They are cheap now days.

Chris - for presentations there is not much need of vectors ... I 
watched Scala and it is very often done with really nice background 
image, plus font scrolling and transitions ... but it has to be smooth

90% of presentations at DevCon 2004 I mean

No they don't -- they have to be arresting.

How much $$$ do companies pay for animated GIFs?

Chris: especially kiosks for prisons...to attract people like Johnny 
Cash

It is about feeling - some ppl don't solve it at all ... looking 
at our Nova TV, when there is some text scrolling, it is hardly readably 
... those ppl are crazy to show such crap .... even our local tv 
using A1200/030 plus Scala is smoother

you say "even"  I think of the Amiga + any software as the benchmark 
everyone else has to meet.

If you're looking for technical perfection, then Rebol might not 
be your answer, but you *can* still turn heads using Rebol/View.

And if you like -- you can start here: http://www.ross-gill.com/r/anim/

The biggest thing from my perspective on Scala is that they have 
the tools to design the advertising.  The tools for content creation 
are sometimes more important for the end-customer than the end user 
experience.

I remember talking to Dave Haynie. He told me, that working at Scala, 
they wrote small OS upon Windows, to get proper timers and to achieve 
smoothness ... if Rebol will be limited to Win32, I am not sure we 
can do better than today no matter how we try. I would go for DirectX 
dependant rebol. Show me one machine, where DirectX is not present 
...

Yeah, to get smooth animation on Windows we had to write a DLL.  
you can't get the clock from within in your own app (bunch of morons).

that is bad  then ...

Petr, you are imposing artificial limitations on yourself.  Ad quality 
animation can be done with Rebol.

Windows is still 90% of machines, if not more .... are things better 
with other OSes, e.g. OSX or Linux?

Pekr you don't need to use windows. Use Linux.

Chris - am I? I just know what I can achieve using Scala, that is 
all :-)

I am using OpenBSD. But there are more multimedia frameworks for 
linux that rebol could interface with.

Petr, that is immaterial.  If you want to do an ad front-end with 
Rebol, it can be done.

Jaime - the thing is - we are very near with Rebol, but not there 
yet, and that is a pity. Dunno what would be neede, but IIRC even 
Carl told us, that better granularity for events is needed and it 
was his plan, but not high on priority list. Dunno if opening View 
would help here ...

Chris - very nice demo ... but maybe I should open content about 
"who produces the smoothest text scrolling demo wins :-)"

Why does that matter?  Why do ads have to be smooth?

because smoothness produces better kind of attraction to ad

They don't need to be smooth, they just need to be smart.

Jaime's point is closer to the mark -- it is authoring that matters.

I played few presentation for ppl using ppt and than few ones using 
Scala ... I did it on intention and I do remember those reactions 
...

Chris showed a great presentation tool + presentation, custom crafted 
for DevCon2004, which looked so effortless, maybe some people did 
not know how cool it really was...;-)

eFish -- I need to get around to publishing it.

It wasn't smart, but would get your attention.  It was interactive 
to boot.

It wasn't 'smooth', that is...

arresting

the cool thing in my mind is that it didn't look like a presentation 
slide show.

but why not be kings, if we could be kings ... how would you do image 
transitions, if we will not have fast means of pixel changes? Pokeing 
at image is not the way to go ... hopefully Cyphre has something 
in mind and will influence Carl a bit as he did with AGG ....

you rounded the corners, you made it more tween a movie and a presentation...nice 
blend.