Plan for "Narrative Slideshow" Application


by Joe Solinsky

Purpose:
This application will display, in sequence, a series of images, narrating each image with a caption and a date, in natural human speech. The application will store each "slideshow" as a configuration file, allowing the user to create multiple sequences of different images and narrations.

Approach:
The application will make use of the Amiga's built-in speech synthesizer to perform the narration. It will also use the built-in Multiview application to display the images. The application will also use a graphical interface to establish the image files and the narration content. Reference User Interface Diagram Sidebar for details.

User interface

Components:
The speech synthesizer, which is a combination of hardware and a software library to communicate to the hardware, is an advanced existing system, which can execute over 40 different phonemes found in the English language; it also interprets common English words into these phonemes, and handles complex sentence grammar and numeric symbols, which is important when narrations include dates and descriptions. It has been tested, and operates as described.

The Multiview application is an interface to view files in general purpose; it takes advantage of Amiga Datatypes and libraries to open images. It can recognize supported files without specification beyond a filename and path, and does not pose any restrictions on filenames or their location. This component is a portion of the OS, and comes with several built-in image file datatypes. This component will be considered operational and tested to work for those image file formats only; any additional image file formats will be determined tested by testing results relevant to the Amiga Datatypes and libraries that service those formats.

The User Interface component will control addition of new slides, as well as areas to add a description, title, and the date the slide was taken. The interface will also allow control over the order of the slides, and allow one to remove slides, along with their description. The library must be available in the library path for the Operating System in order for the program to run properly.

The File component will permit storage of a single slideshow to the predetermined filename "slideshow.prefs" located in the same directory as the application itself. The contents of this file will be loaded on startup, if the file is available. The file component will work properly so long as the file is written only by this program. It is not a requirement that the application work correctly if the specified file has been edited, but the application must be able to work without the file

available at all.

Operation: The application will contain four elements. The first element will initialize the library and attempt to load the slideshow definition file, then proceed to format the main interface. The second element will manage the user interface, and update the slideshow in memory, as the user adds, removes, organizes, and annotates the slideshow. Addition of new slides will use a common file requester. The third element of the application will present the slideshow, using the display component and the speech component to display the images in the slideshow, and speak the annotations for each slide, in order. This element will also clean up the open image windows and return to the second element. The fourth element will save the slideshow definition file, close the graphical user interface, and free library resources properly.

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