In relation to my previous post about instant replay in QuickTime Player - The script dictionary almost looks like a program wrote the documentation. For example:
“time scale (integer, r/o) : the time scale of the movie” (uh…) and
“current time (integer) : the current time (can be set by name as well as number)” (units? what names?).
I guess it all makes sense if you understand a lot about QuickTime movies, but is that the audience for the script dictionary? I suggest not.
Developers: your script dictionary and its documentation are important user interface concerns - if you put as much consideration into the experience your users have with scripting as you do the GUI and documentation, it will create loyal power users. And they all have blogs these days, so that’s free advertising too…
1:13 pm August 1, 2006
under mac, programming
Michael, If its the same as the Cocoa QTKit (which has the same lack of comprehensible documentation), then time scale is 600 default, and refers to the number of intervals within a second. So for the default value, the scale is 1/600th of a second. So the current time would be in 600th’s of a seconds. I had the same problem and I only learned this by trail and error (and a bit of help from some Apple sample code…). hope that helps… william
Ah, OK. That does make sense - I guess it might change for some kinds of movies or something. Thanks - I wonder if you can put links to further web documentation in your scripting dictionary. That might have cleared things up here and kept the duplicate work down for the dictionary author…
This infomration mostly comes from the description of the QTTime struct, whose values include timeScale and timeValue. Check out: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/QuickTime/Reference/QTKitFramework/Miscellaneous/QTKitFunctions/index.html It’s similarly vague. Then again, its not as bad as: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/QuickTime/Reference/QTKitFramework/Classes/QTMovieClass/Reference/Reference.html#//appleref/doc/cref/QTMovieExport (”Information to come”…) that I had to figure out to export movies. Ugh. Far more helpful is to look at the FAQ: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2138.html where some code snippets (ie the ones using the makeTime function) make it fairly obvious what is going on. I am totally in agreement that if the reference for API is bad, it is as bad as writing a bad GUI for an App. On the other hand, I’d rather have an undocumented API to an unsupported one, and I’d even rather have the later to an non-existant one… Gotta go catch the 41=). william