6-13-02

Big Brother Is Watching You! by Erick Tejkowski

This week we'll build a video surveillance application. It's great fun for spying on your kid sis, keeping an eye on your toddler, or watching the sunset... all without leaving your computer. Not only is it fun and useful, but it's also really easy to get started with video in REALbasic. We'll show you how!

Preparation

There's a new video and audio capture plug-in on the block: BESTCapture Plug-in from BEST Software Design. Visit their site and download the demo version of the plug-in. It is a commercial product, but the demo is fully functional with the exception of a nag screen. Once you have downloaded the plug-in, place it in the Plugins folder of REALbasic.

Build the Interface

Launch REALbasic. Open Window1 and add a BESTCapture Control to the window from the Toolbar. In the Properties window, turn on the Preview and EnableVideo properties by clicking them. Next, add a PushButton to the window. Arrange the interface to your liking. An example in OS 9 might look like this (this plug-in is OS X compatible too!):

Close Window1 and create a new window by selecting File-New Window. The new window will be named Window2, but you don't have to do anything more to it. Simple, eh?

Source Code

Open Window1 again and double click PushButton1 to open the Code Editor. To its Action event, add the following code:

  dim p as picture
  dim preview As  Window2
  dim d as date 
  
  p = BESTCapture1.grabPicture(32)
  if p<>nil then
    preview = new Window2
    preview.backdrop = p 
    d=new date 
    preview.title = d.longdate 
    preview.width=p.width
    preview.height=p.height
  end if

Believe it or not, that's it! Select Debug-Run to test your code. If all goes well, you should see video when you launch the project. Keep in mind that you will need to have some kind of video source connected to your Mac for this to work. If you encounter troubles and still aren't seeing video as expected, check out the ShowVideoSettings method in the documentation for the plug-in.

Conclusion

That's all for this week. You can download the completed project. Have fun playing with your new toy and see you next week!

6-11-02

REALbasic News by Erick Tejkowski

BSD Examples Matthias van Duin has posted some new REALbasic examples. "BSD Examples" shows how to create pipes and spawn child processes in BSD. These gems are available at: http://www.nubz.org/

QuickTime Plugins Alfred Van Hoek has announced the availability of two new versions of his popular plugins: MovieWorks for improving your images, hinting movies, exporting URL-based movies and MovieWires to make your movies respond to the user. Get them here.

Writer 2.8 KennettNet has released Writer 2.8 for Mac OS 8.5 - 9.x.x and for Mac OS X. This is a major update to the popular text editing programs, which are made with REALbasic.

HTVCPSocket Remember our version tracking code from a few weeks back? Kevin Ballard informs me that he created a version-checking class called HTVCPSocket (HTVCP == HyperText Version Checking Protocol). It uses a web server to hold a specially-formatted file of http-style tags (the tags can be hidden inside a real web page too) and uses those to control version checking. You can find it here.

LogFile Jose Cruz has announced an updated beta release of LogPile. Now at version 1.0b5, this OS X utility has the following changes:

• complete rewrite of the preferences code. LogPile now uses a REALDatabase file to retrieve/store its preferences. This approach makes for better maintainability. LogPile will also delete the old preferences file if present.
• added access to the console.log file stored in the /var/tmp directory.
• the filter engine should now extract lines that contain or does not contain the specified string.
• users can now choose what printer font to use.
• more minor UI tweaks.

rXML Sascha Leib wrote to informus about the new "rXML" parser class. rXML is published under the LGPL, that is, it's free and Open Source. You can download rXML here.

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