QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Acknowledgments

Brett McLaughlin deserves huge thanks for getting this book to you. Not only is he the creator of the Developer’s Notebook series and the editor of this book, but he also saw that QuickTime for Java was a topic whose need for practical know-how (to navigate the media jargon, obtuse concepts, and teeming “gotchas”) was well-suited for this series. Chuck Toporek at O’Reilly was also very helpful in getting people excited about the book. And, of course, I wouldn’t even be writing for O’Reilly if I hadn’t bumped into Daniel Steinberg at the Mac OS X conference a few years ago, which ultimately led to our working together to edit the ONJava and java.net web sites.

The members of the quicktime-java and quicktime-api mailing lists, and the OpenQTJ project at java.net, have also been extremely helpful in working through problematic material and passing along those nuggets of knowledge that you’re somehow “just supposed to know.” In particular, the material in Chapter 6 about working around the incomplete state of video capture came in many ways from bits of discussion here and there saying, “you can get it to work by passing in your own GWorld.” After I posted an early version of this book’s “motion detector” example, some quicktime-java members developed it further into a more general-purpose capture preview. Tech reviewers Rolf Howarth, Anthony “aNt” Rogers, Dmitry Markman, and Sean Gilligan have also been generous with their time, attention, and knowledge, and have made this a far better book than it would have been without them.

I couldn’t contact my friends on the QuickTime team while working on this book—another publisher has exclusive access to those developers for QuickTime titles—so they were probably wondering where I was while this book was in silent running. But they’ve been very supportive in the past and I’m looking forward to being able to work with them again.

I wouldn’t even have a programming career if Tammie Childs at Pathfire hadn’t taken a chance on me when all I had to speak of for my programming skills were a couple of crazy applets. She also took me back in when Piece Of Crap Wireless Companies No.s 1 and 2 crashed and burned, and still encouraged me to pursue my interests when articles led to editing and then to books.

Finally, I want to thank my wife Kelly, and our son Keagan, for being supportive while I took a big chance on writing a book, and for cutting Daddy some slack when he needed to go downstairs and do more writing. I hope that Keagan hasn’t picked up the more extreme expressions that I emitted while working through some of the less stable parts of QuickTime for Java. By the way, you’ll notice that Keagan is all over this book for two reasons: first, I don’t have to pay license fees on media I own, such as my own iMovies, and second, he’s quite cute.

Obligatory O’Reilly music check: this time it was Roxy Music, the Kinks, Nellie McKay, Elvis Costello, Thelonious Monk, a bunch of anime soundtracks (notably .hack//SIGN, Nadia, FLCL, and Cowboy Bebop), and the streaming audio stations Radio Dupree, Armitage’s Dimension, and Gamer Girl Radio.