Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.multimedia
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!tcapener
From: tcapener@watserv1.waterloo.edu (CAPENER TD - ENGLISH )
Subject: Re: Wishlist for AmigaVision
Message-ID: <1991May22.005806.14192@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Keywords: AmigaVision, wishes
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <1229@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 22 May 1991 00:58:06 GMT
Lines: 50


While people are making out AmigaVision wish lists I'd like to add a few
features.  I am designing college-level courseware and AmigaVision's current
text handling is totally inadequate for most of my tasks (I am designing
English Literature lessons).  These additions would make AmigaVision MUCH
more useful for a lot of applications (we could even design CDTV applications
with it):

     o When a scrolling text box is on screen, leave any other buttons on
       the screen active too (besides the text box's "pg up", "pg dwn", and
       so on).  This means I could put it a "help" button or a "quit all"
       button (but please make it as open-ended as possible--that is, don't
       just add "help" and "quit all", let us decide what buttons
       should be active).

     o Allow us to define highlighted phrases within a text which return
       response strings which we can act on (this way we can do hypertext).
       This would mean putting a "pause" check-box in the text-box's 
       definition dialogue box and forcing us to poll text-box icons in
       a loop rather than just calling the icon and getting control back
       after the user presses our "quit" button, but I think it is necessary.

These two suggestions are the only ones I think are ABSOLUTELY necessary (for
me, of course) but here are some others which would be nice.

     o Allow us to define a proportional text-scroll gadget in a text box
       like most word-processors have.

     o Let us make "conditional" blocks of text which are displayed
       depending on the value of an expression.

       "The Voyager space probe is travelling very fast.
       |If country=="USA"
        It is travelling at over 300 miles per second.
       |Endif
       |If country~="USA"
        It is travelling at over 500 km/sec
       |Endif"

       Ignoring the silliness of my text, this would be a very useful
       addition which would allow us to make "smart" text that could
       tailor itself to the context in which the reader encounters it.
       Perhaps you might need a different syntax, and you might want to
       add an "Else" clause, but I hope you get the idea.

I think you can see that I am kind of text oriented, but I think these things
would be valuable additions to AmigaVision in general.  The text handling
portion of AmigaVision is the most restricted part, and these additions would
make it as flexible in this area as it is in others.

