This was one of my biggest personal development project that was never published to the world (until now!)…Media Impact. Back in 2001, I abandoned it due to other obligations, but it certainly holds the place of a Disco Lemonade in my portfolio because it has pretty much EVERYTHING and it’s tasty 🙂
Multimedia, concurrent audio, custom UI, navigation, transitions, and I built the whole engine such that it’s completely scalable and customizable for any occasion—meaning, this presentation is about Africa, but I could give this program to anyone non-technical, and they could make it about any topic, like Jimi Hendrix’s life! That’s the beauty of this. In this video, I ran it exactly as I coded it back in 2001 and it runs on Windows 10 today beautifully.
Why? Because, all the codes are native Windows APIs. No external libraries, no external plug-ins…they were all coded straight to the Windows OS at the time and it’ll always work. Although some little tweaks can be made to enhance it. I haven’t modified the code yet, but if I do (and I may), the controls and experience will be even better today.
But this isn’t about just ONE dog-and-pony show. It goes beyond this presentation and scales to infinite possibility without any change! I built it as a framework much like a light Office PowerPoint platform. Users/authors therefore can have unlimited slides/pages, multimedia on top of another without conflict, narrate their stories as you wish, add transitions, and more…without any coding from the author. Beautiful, ain’t it? Yes, good as a Disco Lemonade.
This video demonstrates these key things:
– Sound per slide and its content and user’s ability to interact freely
– Navigation/jump to any slide on demand in addition to forward/back anytime
– Different visual transitions and how they are independent of each other and yet work in conjunction
– Various elements per slide: video, image, text, sound effects, and midi for example
What’s not shown in video (outside the scope):
– The colors of the presentation (background, text, etc.) can also be configured
– The story line is your imagination! You can present anything! Any sound, multimedia, and other content related to your story…without having to change ANY code.
– A consistent framework and yet offers customizable banners and all contents.
– How simple is to author a new story! (I’ll be happy to demo that if there’s enough interest)
– Extremely fast, low memory requirements (again because I use native Windows APIs talking to the OS directly)
I can think of more enhancements but given that I wrote the entire thing myself on top of my job and family at the time, I think it turned out pretty good. Ironically for the very same reason, I never got to publish/share it with the world; there were things still undone and never had the time to get back to those. But here we are! Enjoy the demo and for questions on the design, architecture and how to build sustainable software, please contact me (esp. via my blog since I don’t check YouTube messages often).
This was coded in C/C++.
I think going over the concept and design would be a great educational material for STEM students or anyone wanting to learn or expand in programming.
If you’re interested in getting the self-contained program and framework (including this demo) or want to create your own stories for the world, contact me. Cheers!
