Daydreamer 1.1

Table of Contents
System Requirements
Getting Started
Menus
Getting URLs
Errors
Scripting Daydreamer
Paying for Daydreamer


System Requirements
Daydreamer 1.1 runs on Mac OS X.

Getting Started
When you first start Daydreamer, you will see a dialog reminding you that it is shareware.



As the dialog says, you will have 30 days to try Daydreamer without being bugged, but after 30 days, you will be reminded each time you start it.



Next, unless you have opened one of the sample documents, you will be presented with the settings dialog:



It’s pretty much self-explanatory. You need to enter the URL to the picture you want to view. This can be a web URL (http://machine/path), a file transfer URL (ftp://machine/path) or a file URL to a file on your own machine (file:///path). If you are not familiar with URLs, there is documentation later in this document. You also need to enter how often you would like to have the picture retrieved. You will want to check and see how often the picture is updated. After all, it doesn’t make sense to get a picture every 5 minutes if it is only changed every half hour.

Daydreamer displays pictures in two sizes: the full size of the original picture (or as much as can be displayed on your screen) and a usually smaller size that is set with the “Window Width” item. The alternate size comes up first, and you switch between the sizes by using the green window button (or the zoom item in the window menu). The aspect ratio of the original picture is preserved at all times. Note that the window width can be bigger than the original picture’s width.

If you check the “Create Time Lapse Movie” item, the dialog changes to let you specify the movie:



The space at the top of the movie box will display the current time lapse movie’s path, if one has been specified. The radio buttons allow you to either continue using the movie whose path is displayed, or to choose a new movie. If you want to choose a new movie, you will get a file dialog after you click “OK” on this sheet.

If you click “Cancel”, there will be no document created. If you click “OK” and you have not specified a URL, or you have entered anything but a URL beginning with http, ftp or file, you will see:



When you click “OK”, the settings dialog will be redisplayed.

If you have selected “Create Time Lapse Movie” and “Choose a different or new movie”, and you have entered a valid URL, you will see a standard file dialog:



Navigate to where you want to save the movie, enter the name of the movie and press “Save.”

Note: if you enter the name of an existing file in this location, you will get a dialog asking if you want to replace that file. If you say “OK”, Daydreamer will not replace the file. If the file is a QuickTime movie, Daydreamer will add the new frames to that movie. If the file is some other kind of file, the results are unknown, but it probably won’t be pretty.

You can also get started by opening one of the existing files that come with Daydreamer. In that case, you will not see the “Settings” dialog.

After the settings have been set, either through the dialog, or read from a file, Daydreamer will start to get the picture. A window will open, first displaying “Starting Up”, followed by “Connected”, then “Downloading”. When the picture has been downloaded, it will be displayed. If there are errors in the connection, they will also be displayed. Once a picture has been downloaded, the status messages will not be displayed while the document is open.

Menus
Under the Apple menu, you will find “About Daydreamer...”. If you select that you will see:



This gives you the information about Daydreamer. It also lets you enter your registration code. If you click “Register”, you will see:



When you register with Kagi, either using the Register program or the web site, you will receive an email back. The email will contain, in addition to a confirmation of your order information, the registration code. This will be in almost the last paragraph of the message.

Enter the name and code as given in the message and click “Register.” If you are not ready to do that, you can click “Not Yet.” If you have entered a valid registration code, the About box will change to include “This copy registered to” and the name you registered with. You can also enter the registration code by clicking “Register” in the reminder dialog that appears when you start after 30 days.

The File menu:



allows you to make a new document, open an old one, close the front document, Save the changes, export the picture to one of the formats QuickTime can handle, print the picture, or quit. When you select “New”, you will get the settings dialog as discussed earlier. Selecting “Open...” shows you an open dialog:



This does not open a picture, per se, but all of the settings saved in that document. The picture pointed to by the saved URL will be downloaded as soon as the document is read.

Selecting “Save As...” or “Save” is the document has nor been saved, will result in a standard save dialog:



This does not save the picture, just all the settings you have entered, as well as the current size, position and zoom of the window.

Revert will revert the settings to those last saved.

If you want to save the picture that is currently being displayed, you can use the Export command. When you select “Export...”, you will see:



Daydreamer uses QuickTime, so the picture can be saved in whatever QuickTime can export to. As of this writing, QuickTime exports to:



If you select “Print...” from the File menu, Daydreamer will print the current picture in the front document. It will print it as large as will fit on one page, up to the original size of the picture. The picture will be centered on the page.

The Edit menu only has one command that is really available, “Change Settings...”.



(Cut, Copy, Paste, Clear and Select all do work in the edit fields in the settings dialog.) Selecting “Change Settings...” brings up the same dialog that you see when you create a new document. The changes take effect immediately, but the picture will probably not change at once. The new picture does need to be downloaded before it can be displayed.

The last menu is the Window menu:



The Window menu has several options for controlling windows. It also lists the current open windows. The first 9 windows that Daydreamer has open can also be brought to the front with keyboard commands. In addition, the front window can be zoomed with a keyboard command.

URLs
Daydreamer can understand web (http), file transfer (ftp) and local file (file) URLs. How do you get these URLs? Daydreamer comes with several documents that have URLs to interesting changing pictures on the Internet. Note: The URLs in the documents included with Daydreamer pointed to valid changing pictures when I posted them. I can’t guarantee that they will remain valid.

There are websites on the net that have changing pictures on them. Once you have found a picture, you need to get the URL. How you get it depends on the browser you use. there are at least six web browsers available for Mac OS X, and they are all slightly different.

The easiest way to get a picture URL from a web browser to Daydreamer is available in Mozilla and Chimera Navigator, both open source web browsers based on the Gecko engine, and in iCab. Open a new document in Daydreamer. Arrange the windows so that the web browser is in front, and so that you can see a portion of the URL edit box in the Settings sheet in Datdreamer. Drag the picture over the URL edit box and release. The URL will be entered into the sheet.

You can also paste the URL into the URL edit box in the Settings sheet. How you copy the URL depends on the browser. In any case, you will start by pointing the mouse at the picture and either press and hold the mouse button and wait or press the Control key on the keyboard and press and hold the mouse button.


OmniWeb

Opera


Mozilla

Netscape 6.2

iCab

OmniWeb, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and iCab have different names for it, but they will all allow you to directly copy the URL. Internet Explorer and Chimera Navigator make you work a little harder for it. Their popups will offer to open the image in its own window:


Internet Explorer

Chimera Navigator

When the picture is showing, you can Copy the URL from the Address box of that new window. No matter which browser you have, you now have the URL on the clipboard, and you can proceed to select the URL edit box of the Setting sheet of a Daydreamer document, and paste in the URL.

If you want to use Daydreamer to view a file on your own disk, you can either make use of one of the scripts included with Daydreamer, or you can enter a file URL into the settings dialog. A file URL has the form “file:///path”. The path must include everything from the disk name down through the file itself. Folders are separated by slashes, not colons as in Mac OS.

Suppose that my disk is named “Macintosh HD” and I have a “don” account. In a normal Mac OS X installation, I will have a “Pictures” folder. In that folder I might have a “Landscapes” folder. Finally, in that last folder is the picture I want to display, “Mountains.jpg”. The file URL would then be “file:///Macintosh HD/Users/don/Pictures/Landscapes/Mountains.jpg”. In a fully valid URL, you would need to replace the spaces with %20, and any special characters with the ASCII equivalent, but Daydreamer seems to handle them fine as they are. The only replacement you would have to replace would be slashes “/” in any disk, file or folder name. Those would be replaced with “%2F”.

Errors
Under certain conditions, you might get errors. Errors are displayed on the first attempt to get a picture. The assumption is that if you have a picture, you would rather see it than have the picture go away if the connection is broken or the server is too busy or goes down while the next picture is being fetched.

If you don’t have an Internet connection or the host in the URL cannot be reached, you will see:



You will want to check the Internet connection and the host. If you can get to the host, and the path to the picture is wrong, you will see:



In this case, you may need to check and see if you have the right path for the picture you want. If there are any other errors in the connection, you will see:



Scripting Daydreamer

Daydreamer is AppleScriptable. Among other things, you can create a new document, change the settings of an existing document or export the current picture.

Scripting Daydreamer usually means commands that have to do with documents, though you can get information about windows. Documents can be referred to by name or by numeric index. The numeric index is the order in which the document was created which is the same as the order in the Window menu.

The following table summarizes what can be done.

AppleScript Command Acts On Example Discussion
close document, window close document 1 saving yes saving in file filePath closes the document or window. The saving option can be yes or no. If it is yes, you can specify a file to save the document in
count document, window set numDocs to count documents Returns the number of documents or windows that are open.
data size document, window set docSize to data size of document 1 I can’t really imagine what you would use this for
exists document, window set docExists to exists document named "Key West" This is useful for finding out if a document is open
open file set theDoc to open file filePath Opens a document from a file path
print document print document 1 prints the picture of the specified document
revert document revert document 1 reverts the settings of the specified document to the last saved settings
save document save document 1 saving in file filePath as imageClass saves the document. If you include the saving in clause, you can specify a filepath. If you include the as clause, you will export the picture. Make sure that you use a class that the version of QuickTime that you have installed can export to (see above)
get document, window see below get one or more of the properties of an object
set document, window see below set one or more of the properties of an object
make document see below discussed in detail below

To really discuss get, set and make, the properties of documents and windows must be discussed. Properties are what can be gotten or set for an element. The properties of a window are:

Property type description
bounds rectangle the boundary rectangle for the window
closeable boolean Does the window have a close box?
titled boolean Does the window have a title bar?
index integer the number of the window
floating boolean Does the window float?
modal boolean Is the window modal?
resizable boolean Is the window resizable?
zoomable boolean Is the window zoomable?
zoomed boolean Is the window zoomed?
name international text the title of the window
visible boolean is the window visible?
position point upper left coordinates of window


Most of the window properties are not terribly interesting. In fact, most of them are read only. Only the bounds and the zoomed are really writable. You could set the window size by saying

set the bounds of window 1 to {20,20, 300,300}

This probably wouldn’t be the best idea because the aspect ratio of the picture would not be preserved. Of course, you could write a script that got the bounds, figured out the aspect ratio, and set different bounds while taking into account the aspect ratio.

The document properties get to the meat of what Daydreamer does. In fact, they are all of the settings, plus a couple.

Property type description
name international text the title of the document
modified boolean Has the document been modified since the last save?
URL text The URL the document will display. Must point to a picture.
frequency integer How often, in minutes, the picture at the URL is fetched.
make time lapse movie boolean true if the document is set to make a time lapse, false if it is not.
movie file file The file in which the time lapse movie is saved.
movie frame duration real The duration of each frame in the time lapse movie in seconds (fractional values allowed).
width integer The width of the window when it is not zoomed.
position point upper left coordinates of window
properties record property that allows getting and setting of multiple properties.


Of these properties, only name and modified are read only. movie frame duration allows you to set how long a given frame is displayed in a movie. This is a setting not setable in the user interface. It is generally set for a tenth of a second. This is fine for a time lapse movie, but scriptability allows slide shows. A tenth of a second is far too short for a slide show.

The properties property makes it possible to get and set several properties at once. For example,

set propertyRecord to the properties of document 1

would return all of the settings of document 1. While you get all of the properties when you use the properties property, you don’t need to set all of them at once. If you wanted to start recording and specify a movie you could do it

set the movie file of document 1 to file "Macintosh HD:movies:New QT Movie"
set the make time lapse movie of document 1 to true

Or you could do it in one statement

set the properties of document 1 to { movie file: file "Macintosh HD:movies:New QT Movie", make time lapse movie:true}

You can use the same idea with the make command. If you simply say

set theDoc to make new document

Daydreamer will open the settings dialog. If you say

set theDoc to make new document with properties {URL:"http://www.thisplace.com/images/webcam.jpg", frequency:10, make time lapse movie:false}

a new document will be created, and the picture will be displayed. There are defaults for everything but URL. If you don’t specify a URL, your document will not open. make returns a reference to the document, so it’s a good idea to set a variable to the make statement so that you can change the document later.

For more information on scripting, look at the examples in the scripts folder.

Paying for Daydreamer

Daydreamer has the following pricing. Single user licenses, $10 per user. A Site License costs $500 (equal to 50 users) and covers all locations for your organization within a 160 kilometer radius of your site (100 miles). One big advantage of a Site License is that you do not need to keep track of how many people at your site are using the software. A World-Wide License costs $2000 and it covers all locations for your organization on the planet earth.

Paying for Daydreamer is fairly simple. You can either use the Register program that you downloaded with the program, or you can register online .

If you choose not to register online, open the Register program that accompanies Daydreamer. Enter your name, your email address, and the number of single user licenses you desire for each program you wish to purchase (or Site or Word-Wide licenses). Save or Copy or Print the data from the Register program and send the data and payment to Kagi. Kagi is one of the companies that handle my payment processing.

If paying with Credit Card or First Virtual, you can email or fax the data to Kagi. Their email address is sales@kagi.com, and their fax number is 1 510 652-6589. You can either Copy the data from Register and paste it into the body of an email message, or you can Save the data to a file and attach that file to an email message. There is no need to compress the data file; it’s already pretty small. If you have a fax modem, just Print the data to the Kagi fax number.

Payments sent via email are processed within 3 to 4 days. You will receive an email acknowledgement when it is processed. Payments sent via fax take up to 10 days, and if you provide a correct Internet email address you will receive an email acknowledgement.

If you are paying with Cash or USD Check, you should print the data using the Register application and send it to the address shown on the form, which is:

Kagi
1442-A Walnut Street #392-DC
Berkeley, California 94709-1405
USA

You can pay with a wide variety of cash from different countries, but at present if you pay via check, it must be a check drawn in US Dollars. Kagi cannot accept checks in other currencies. (The conversion rate for non-USD checks is around USD 15 per check and that is just not practical.) If you have a purchasing department, you can enter all the data into the Register program and then select Invoice as your payment method. Print three copies of the form and send it to your accounts payable department. They must include a copy of the form with the payment. Kagi can not invoice your company, so you need to generate the invoice and handle all the paperwork on your end.

Please do not fax or email payment forms that indicate Cash, Check or Invoice as the payment method. Payments sent via postal mail take time to reach Kagi and then up to 10 days for processing. Again, if you include a correct email address, you will hear from Kagi when the form is processed.

If you do not have an email address, please enter your complete postal address. Please remember we do not know what country you live in, so please enter that into the postal address also. If you do not have an email address, you should consider selecting the Postcard Receipt so that Kagi can inform you of your registration key. Kagi transmits the registration keys via email and paid postcard receipt only.

As noted above, after 30 days Daydreamer will remind you about paying the shareware on each startup until you enter the registration key. When you pay, Kagi will send you the key. You can either enter the key in Daydreamer when it asks, or you can select “About Daydreamer”from the Apple menu, click Register and enter it there.

Back to the Daydreamer page.