Daydreamer 1.1

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

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: