Hi, Alan, and all,
The first alpha release of a new event-tape-editing tool, called the "Event Roll", has now been published to the etoys/olpc2.0 update stream.
Click on the magenta "?" buttons on the Event-Theatre and the Event- Roll to obtain instructions and hints. The text of these help messages could still stand improvement, but may be adequate for getting started.
A few important things to know and watch out for in this initial release:
(1) To get the halo on any token in an Event Roll, hold down the SHIFT key as you halo-click on it.
(2) Do *NOT* overlap mouse-event-sequence tokens in an Event Roll. It's fine to move them or resize them, just don't let any two of them overlap, since once the time-stamps of unrelated mouse event get mixed together, it is impossible to separate the individual sequences again. I'll bulletproof against this in January.
(3) The event-theatre work at present does not play nicely with event-recordings that span multiple projects, nor even with nested invocations of event-theatre-based playbacks. These loose ends will also be addressed in January. For multi-project event-tapes, please continue to use the "traditional" event-recorder (rather than an "event theatre,") and, for now, in such event recordings do not mix event-theatre-based sequences with other event recordings. Sorry about this limitation -- hopefully it can be sorted out in the new year.
(4) To *move* an event-roll, alt-drag it. Or, to drag it without using a modifier key, pick it up by clicking on the area near the left edge where you see the "mouse", "keyboard", and "media" words
(5) The "keyboard" track at present only deals with *keystrokes* -- not with individual key-down and key-up events. This is because the underlying event-recorder mechanism for capturing key-down and key-up information seems quite inconsistent and unreliable.
(6) After you've made an event-recording, if you want to add voiceovers you can do it in either of two ways:
[a] Play back the recording with the "sound" panel open (triangle control at bottom-right of event-theatre); once you start playback, a button will appear in the sound panel offering the opportunity to record voiceover. Hit it when you wish, and record your voiceover; hit "stop recording voiceover" when you're done. You can do this multiple times per pass through the event tape if desired, and you can can make multiple passes through the tape. Every voiceover you record will appear in the Media track of the Event Roll at the appropriate place. You can remove an unwanted voiceover by just picking up its token in the event roll and dragging it out.
[b] Alternatively, use a separate, traditional, Squeak "Sound Recorder" to record a snippet of voiceover. It may help to play back the event tape as you do this. When done with a sound snippet, use the "Morph" button on the sound-recorder to get a little rectangular "sound morph" that represents the sound; drop that little rectangle where you want the voiceover to appear in the event roll.
I will be out of town, and probably mostly (or entirely) away from internet connectivity, until the first weekend in January. I invite my colleagues Takashi and Yoshiki to support and improve these tools in any way they wish, if they have time and inclination; in any case, once I am back I will pick up the pieces of this work, and will try to deal quickly with bugs and other issues that have arisen in the meantime.
Cheers,
-- Scott