ComboWalker™ComboWalker™ is an amalgamation of programs we found useful when working with a large set of PICT or Movie files. It allows you to operate on a folder of files as well as individual files. If you use a folder, you may choose to recursively walk all the folders within that folder. It is indispensable when you are creating a CD-ROM full of movies.Using ComboWalker revolves around the Action menu. Use the Action menu to select the basic type of operation you want to perform. A dialog will appear for options pertinent to the action . Then, a dialog will appear asking you to select a file or folder to operate on. If you can choose a folder, a dialog similar to the following appears.If you want to work on just a file, you just select the file and click on Open. If you want to work on a folder, you must be in the folder, "Cool Stuff for my CD" in this example, and click on Select Current Folder. The Recurse check box will determine whether the operation is performed recursively for the folder.If the operation requires a destination file or folder, another dialog will appear for choosing the destination. If the destination is a file, you can over write an existing file. If the destination is a folder, the new folder cannot already exist. The folder structure of the source, will be duplicated in the new folder.To select the action you want to perform, use the Action Menu.The PICT walker performs a variety of operations on PICT files. Compress pictures allows you to compress PICT files. Movie Walker performs operations on Movie files. Flatten Movies will flatten movies into self-contained movie files. Concatenate Movies will create movies that are self-contained within a single file. Fix Aliases for making a CD will fix the aliases of files so that an alias will match the appropriate file on a CD.After you have performed an operation, the Do it again menu item becomes available. You can use this if you want to perform the operation again using the same settings. The file selection dialogs will appear to specify what files to perform the operation on. The type of operation is indicated with a check mark.When an operation is in progress, the following main status window appears:At the top of the dialog, the Action name is displayed. The top progress bar indicates how many files the operation has processed so far. Next is the name of the file being processed. If the second progress bar appears, it indicates the progress of an operation on the file. Finally, there is the name of the folder the file is in.If you wish to cancel the operation, click on the cancel button at any time. If you want to pause the operation, press on the pause button. The button will change to Resume, press it to continue. The continue button is used under certain error conditions. If you switch to another application, ComboWalker automatically pauses.Pict Walker…When you walk PICT files you may display them, add preview and custom icons, or set the creator type.Displaying all the PICTs of a folder or disk is useful for verifying that the images are viewable. If you display the PICT file, you can set how many seconds the picture is visible. If you select 0 for the delay, you must click in the picture window before it will advance to the next file.If you add a preview, a QuickTime preview is created for the file. A file preview will be available from standard file for QuickTime preview aware applications (such as Picture Compressor).If you add a custom icon, a special System 7.0 finder icon will be added to your file. Sometimes it will not appear until you reboot the system. The custom icon is a miniature of the picture.You can set the creator type of the files so that you can specify which application will launch when a file is opened under the finder. For example, setting this to 'ppxi' for PICT files will cause Picture Compressor to launch.After clicking on OK, the file selection dialog will appear.Compress Pictures…When you compress a PICT file, you must select the compression settings you want to use. This is performed with the standard compression dialog box above.After clicking on OK, the file selection dialog will appear. If you select a file, you will be asked to name a new file for the new compressed image. If you select a folder, you will be asked to name a new folder into which the new compressed images will go.Movie Walker…When you walk Movie files you may play them, verify them, add previews and custom icons, remove custom icons, set the creator type, or fix the aliases contained in the movie files.Playing all the Movies of a folder or disk is useful for verifying that the movies are playable.Every frame mode plays every frame of video but will not play any audio, nor will the rate setting apply. If you do not use play every frame, you may set the rate for playing the movies. If the rate is 0, the movie will not play until you use the controller. If the rate is less than 0, the movie will play backwards from the end.You can scale the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the movie independently. If you don't want to play the whole movie, you can adjust Amount to Play, which is the maximum number of seconds to play each movie. If you select 0 for amount to play, the complete movie will be played. By playing the couple of seconds of all the movies on a disk, you get a quick check.If you select Set Poster, you must also play the movie. In this case, the movie does not play. Instead, it is opened in pause mode at the current poster position. You may then use the controller to select a new poster time. Click on the Set button to save the new poster time. Click on the Skip button to leave the poster time unaffected.When you verify movies, a status window appears only if a problem occurs. After the verification process is complete, you may print the info window or save it to a text file. You will want to verify all the movies you create before you press a hard disk into a CD.If you add a preview, a QuickTime preview is created for the file. A file preview will be available from standard file for QuickTime preview aware applications (such as MoviePlayer).If you add a custom icon, a special System 7 finder icon will be added to your file. Sometimes it will not appear until you reboot the system. The custom icon is a miniature of the Poster of the movie.If you feel that custom icons in System 7 are too slow, you can use the Remove custom icon button to remove them.You can set the creator type of the files so that you can specify which application will launch when a file is opened under the finder. For example, setting this to 'TVOD' for Movie files will cause MoviePlayer to launch.Fix Aliases for making a CD will fix the aliases of files so that a movie aliases work properly on a CD. See Fix Aliases for making a CD for details.Some applications store the last movie position in the movie's user data. Clear window positions will remove this information from the movies.After clicking on OK, the file selection dialog will appear.Flatten Movies…When you flatten a movie, all the data for the movie is put into a single movie file.You can choose to create a datafork only movie. A datafork movie has no resource fork and all the information for the movie is contained in the data fork of the file. You would create such a movie file if you wanted to transport it to a non-Macintosh computer system.If you don't interleave the data, the data for each track will be contiguous. When you interleave, the data from the different tracks is interleaved in the data track. You may decide against interleaving if you want all the data for a track together in the file.If you choose enabled tracks only, then you will remove unused tracks.The chunking factor lets you set how many 1/2 second chunks of sound to force at the beginning of the flattened movie. Setting this to zero uses the default chunking factor.After clicking on OK, the file selection dialog will appear. After selecting the source file or folder, a file selection dialog will appear so you can select the destination file or create a new folder.Concatenate Movies…You can concatenate a folder of movies together. Normally, there will be a new track in the destination movie for every source track of every source movie. If you choose minimize tracks, the number of tracks created will be minimized. Specifically, all of the video tracks will go into one video track, and all of the sound tracks will go into one sound track.This is also useful for a movie with multiple sound or video tracks. This is the way to create a movie with a single sound track and a single video track if multiple tracks got introduced due to cut/paste between different movies.After clicking on OK, the file selection dialog will appear. After selecting the source file or folder, a file selection dialog will appear so you can select the destination file or create a new folder.Fix CD Aliases…Aliases are used by QuickTime movies. When you press a hard disk into a CD, some of the disk attributes that aliases remember are no longer valid, the main one being the driver name. When a driver name changes on a disk, aliases with fail. Even if you change the hard disk driver name in the aliases to a CD driver name, the aliases will fail if the user has a different CD-ROM driver. Therefore, you must use this tool to fix aliases when you are pressing a CD. It fixes aliases in Movie files and other files with 'alis' resources.After selecting the menu option, the file selection dialog will appear.Bugs/Anomalies:You can remove icons from Movie Files, but you can't remove icons from PICT files.Custom Icons won't appear in the System 7.0 finder until a reboot if a custom icon already exists.', ◊# ˇ ˇˇˇˇ # ◊