interactiveDemoGenerator

This applet generates interactive, animated and audio enabled product demos based a set of hierarchically organized images. The data for the applet is provided in a text file. Two imaginary products, a hardware and a software are chosen to illustrate the capabilities of the applet.

Usage

• If you are using Netscape Communicator and if the applet is not working please try one of the approaches described in this page.
• Our first example is an imaginary personal organizer. Single-click on the four "buttons" to see the various features of the product.
• The applet can also, optionally, read messages from a text file and display them as usage notes. The usage notes for our first example are displayed dynamically as part of the applet.
• Use the 'Home' key on the keyboard to reset the applet.
• The applet can also display images in a loop to produce either an animation or a translation at user-defined speeds. An audio clip can also be played for the duration of the loop. Each display trigger can be specified as response to either a mouseClick or mouseOver event as defined in the data file. A demo of these features is presented in the second example.
• The applet also has a feature to display the mousecoordinates instead of the message text when the applet param MOUSECOORDS value is set to "yes". This feature can be used to "build" the data text file step by step. A demo of this feature is described in this third example.

GO.

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To handle a bug in IE3.0

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Testing Locally

If you are interested in test-driving this applet here is the zip file (32K). This file can display 20 images. The registered version has no limit to the number of images.

Data File Format

A typical segment of the data file looks like:

 n:main.gif:0:0:0:0:0:0:mouseClick:"main"
         nn:main1.gif:16:18:15:234:40:260:mouseClick:"todo list"

The indentations are optional. The header fields n and nn in the two lines indicate that nn is a child of n. The second line says that display "main1.gif" at (16,18) when the the rectangular region (15,234; 40,260) of the parent image (main.gif) is clicked. The "todo list" in the second line says that display the "#todo list" section of the message file (orgmsg.txt) when main1.gif is displayed.

The applet can also be used to build the data text when the MOUSECOORDS param value is set to "yes". A demo of this feature is here.