In Sophie the objective I took was that all interfaces to the operating system had to be done in FFI with a supporting abstract class with concrete classes for 
platform variances. This allows anyone who can read the operating system api docs to fiddle with the code. Otherwise the number of folks who undertake
doing plugin creation and maintenance is few... 

However there are some issues with that, one being you need a plugin to handle async callbacks.  In this case the QuickTimePlugin only responsibility is 
to handle a callback when QuickTime wants to indicate that a video frame has changed.  That signals a semaphore that lets the SophieMovie logic know
it needs to schedule a tweak frame update. 

There is no windows one because we couldn't find anyone to figure out the daunting process of installing the windows tool chain and building the plugin, 
so we settled for a polling cycle that blindly draws based on the supposed frame rate based on the video meta-data.  I'm not sure we actually quantified a 
difference... 

On 2010-08-26, at 2:47 AM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:

> So if there is a QuickTimePlugin, what do you need FFI for?
> 
> - Bert -

--
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>   Twitter:  squeaker68882
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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