Apple: Been There! Done That!

by Don Burnett

I don't usually digress into matters concerning Apple but I thought I should for the moment, just to set the record straight.. A number of people have raised the question if Apple will join the Rich Internet Application arena.. With products like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight getting press as "Video" platforms, we should take a look back at Apple Quicktime and what we know about it and ask ourselves the question, "is Quicktime an RIA Platform?"..

My answer to everyone is YES! What? That's an astonishing answer, but if you remember back in history a little bit you'll find that I am right. Let's jump in the "wayback" machine to Quicktime Pro (past version) and Flash 5.

A little known feature of Quicktime that has been there for a while is one called "Sprite Tracks" and "Flash Tracks". You might be saying to yourself OOOHHH about now.. Because if you look at the definition of an RIA you'll see that it does the following things:

• It's Cross Platform (yes, the Quicktime Player runs on both Mac and Windows)
• It allows for interactive functionality (yes you can place buttons, sprites and animation in your movie)
• It can be embedded in a web page or can be stand alone
• it can go full screen
• it runs on mac
• it runs on windows

The big deal lately with Microsoft Silverlight is that it's not just a media control but it also uses XAML (a subset of the full WPF implementation) that makes cool video presentations possible wrapped around just about any UI elements that you could possibly want..

I would say that Adobe isn't the first to think about this (even with their own Media Player) and neither is Microsoft.

"Flash Tracks" allows you to add (in timelines), a flash movie as a track, with it's own interactivity (which is anything you could do in Flash already for UI, like buttons and interactivity). This has been used extensively in Apple's world famous movie trailers site to add interactive elements to trailer presentations. I would even go as far to say that they were maybe the first RIA applications ever created. But it goes further than that, besides buttons and input, they can control aspects of the quicktime movie (just like Flash can). In fact Flash can go the other way and import Quicktime to it's format already..

So would I say Quicktime is an RIA itself? the answer is YES and through it's symbioship with Flash already, it may go down in history as the first Rich Internet Application platform without ever even getting credit for it. This is not to say there aren't limits (I doubt you'll see a word processing app ever in the Quicktime player), but it was the first in it's area to meet all the definitions.

If you want to read more about this feature of Quicktime Pro:

Check out the following:

QuickTime Pro: How to Create a Movie With a Flash Track

QuickTime Pro: Capabilities of Sprite Tracks

QuickTime Pro: About supported file types