At the heart of Apple's hugely popular iLife software suite-iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, and iTunes-is QuickTime, the powerful media engine that drives elegant applications for managing movies, images, and audio files. The enduring success of QuickTime is in no small part attributable to its component architecture. This key feature has allowed it to embrace emerging digital media technologies and standards one by one as they have appeared over the 12 or so years since its launch. None of the competing technologies even comes close, let alone on both Mac OS X and Windows. QuickTime for .NET and COM Developers is the first guide to QuickTime for developers using popular RAD tools such a Visual Basic .NET, C#, and Visual Basic 6. A general introduction to QuickTime is followed by a detailed explanation of the QuickTime architecture from a.NET and COM perspective, liberally accompanied by code snippets. A number of implementation examples illustrate key QuickTime features, ranging from a simple movie player to a sophisticated interactive application. Also covered is QuickTime scripting in both QuickTime Player (using Windows Scripting) and in Microsoft Office applications (using VBA). Brief guides to developing with QuickTime in Delphi and ATL/WTL are also included. Part of the official Quicktime Developer Series, publishing the finest books on QuickTime in cooperation with Apple. * The first book on QuickTime for .NET and COM application and scripting developers * Written by one of the architects of Apple's QuickTime ActiveX/COM control * Offers numerous sample applications and code examples
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Must have to get started!:
I am new to programming with QuickTime, and needed a jump start to write applications with a QuickTime component. This book takes you through the process of building applications for COM/.NET developers. Using the Apple component is a lot faster than using the SDK. I write a lot of RAD applications and use VB with occasional forays into C#. The author writes clearly and with a lighter style than most technical authors. Sample code is provided and you can visit the website to download code and... more info
A reasonable book about an inadequate API:
The Quicktime API for .NET is heavily slanted towards content re-play rather than content creation. This book adequately covers the API, but doesn't make the leaps necessary to describe Quicktime.NET usable for content creation. Missing are memory management considerations, which are important when creating all but the smallest sample movies in Quicktime. The Quicktime system is huge and it's a daunting task to write one book that describes Quicktime's dot net API when the old Carbon and new-ish Objective-C... more info
