December 18, 2000
Untitled
Today’s web production adventure — a convoluted ballet of file format manipulation and presentation. Imagine if you will, a Java applet. Now imagine having the opportunity selling said Java applet as a downloadable product on a web site. Given this scenario, it would make some amount of sense to allow a potential customer to preview an approximation what the aforementioned Java applet looks like prior to the transaction. Since we can’t assume that the customer has Java running, or that it is properly installed within their browsing environment, an appropriate method of displaying animation or synthesized interactivity provided by the applet would be using a gif file. I realize that if a customer can’t display Java applets in their browser, they’re probably not going to be buying more of them… but that’s beside the point.
Start the dance.Open a local html document containing an applet using Internet Explorer. Stare at the blank page for a while and then realize that you don’t have Java installed. (See previous paragraph.) Slap hand against forehead. Download the latest incarnation of Mac OS Runtime for Java, mount the disk image, and install. Open a local html document containing an applet using Internet Explorer. Create an image sequence of the running applet using SnapzPro that spits out an uncompressed QuickTime movie of a specific section of the screen. Open the movie in Movie Player and export all of the frames to individual tiff files. Manually combine the tiff files into a single layered Photoshop file. Rest head in hands momentarily. Notice that the layers in the Photoshop file were combined in the wrong order. Reorder layers. Create animation frames from the layers using ImageReady. Resize, set frame timing, optimize, and save as gif. Repeat sequence twenty-four times. Sob quietly.
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