QUICK CLICK MORPH press release
Byte Works, Inc.
Copyright (c) 1995 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Price: US$60
Requirements: System 6.0.1, 1.125M RAM
Also supports: Hard drives, printers, accelerator cards
Contact:
Mike Westerfield
Byte Works, Inc.
8000 Wagon Mound Dr. NW
Albuquerque, NM 87120
505-898-8183
MikeW50@AOL.COM
The Byte Works, long the dominant company for Apple II development tools, announced their second productivity tool in a GEnie exclusive on March 19th. The new program puts the G for Graphics back in the Apple IIGS in a big way: Quick Click Morph brings Hollywood style special effects to the Apple II community! You can create movies with morphs, tweens and fades. Quick Click Morph also brings a new standard for movie color on the Apple IIGS, supporting several color palettes including 256 color movies!
Morphs are those amazing movie clips you sometimes see on high budget films and commercials. You start with two or more original pictures, identify a few similar points, like the eyes on a girl and a cat, and the program creates a smooth movie that changes one picture to another. The middle frames, showing a mix of the two pictures, can be amusing, informative, or thought provoking.
Morphs are great attention grabbers. For example, think how effectively you could grab the attention of a 7th grade student with a HyperStudio evolution stack that opens with a morph that gradually changes a pre-human skull to a human skull. Imagine their reaction to continental drift if you grab their attention with a morph that changes Pangaea, the original grouping of continents, smoothly into the current world map.
Morphs are also a great way to make a statement. Morphing your "favorite" politician into Mickey Mouse could release some tension, not to mention get your point across at a meeting.
My favorite morphs are for entertainment. A morph changing my daughter into her cat was an instant neighborhood hit. (This morph is available in GEnie's A2 library.) Mother-daughter morphs and mother-child-father morphs are a lot of fun, too. Whatever your subjects, morphs are a great way to entertain!
Can I Share My Morphs?
Of course, once you create a morph, you'll want to send it to your friends. Morphs created with Quick Click Morph can be played with any standard PaintWorks movie player. We even give you one with Quick Click Morph, and it's freeware, so you can send it to anyone you want at no charge. Our movie player even lets you create a movie slide show that plays selected movies until you tell it to stop.
And for those unfortunate friends who don't have an Apple IIGS, you can always hook a standard VCR recorder from your television set to the monitor output for your Apple IIGS and record all the morphs you want!
What can Quick Click Morph Do?
For those of you who are familiar with Morphing, and want to know the gritty details, here they are! For those of you who have no idea what these details mean, don't worry--the manual teaches you how to create morphs with step-by-step examples that show you how to use the program, not just what the features are!
Quick Click Morph starts with two or more pictures, which you can supply in a variety of formats. These include Apple IIGS screen dumps, Apple Preferred pictures (including 3200 pictures stored in Apple Preferred format) and uncompressed RGB TIFF files.
Once you assemble the original pictures for your morph, you have a variety of options for each sequence. You control the number of frames, how fast the colors shift, the way the images change, and much more.
Picking the control points to tell the program how to map one picture to another is a key feature of any Morph program, and Quick Click Morph gives you a lot of flexibility. You can choose from control points or lines. Color coding helps you see which points correspond between your start and end frames. You can look at the frames full size, or shrunk so the entire frame fits in the available space, and you can view one frame or the start-end frame pair. A simple click of the mouse creates a control point, and moving one is as simple as dragging it with the mouse.
You can pick from a variety of color palettes. Grayscale movies are great for any application. For geometric morphs, the standard 320 mode color palette is a fast and effective color choice. HyperStudio likes to work in the standard 640 color palette, and Quick Click Morph is happy to oblige. You can also select a custom 16 color palette. All of these choices lead to fast morphs which take as little as 30 seconds per frame on an unaccelerated Apple IIGS. (The time goes up with the number of control points. Typical morph times on an unaccelerated Apple IIGS are about 5 minutes per frame.)
If you'd like to invest a little more computer time on a morph, you can also pick from the dazzling 128 color and 256 color morphs! These formats take full advantage of the Apple IIGS's multiple color palettes. And due to some behind the scenes tricks, these full-color movies can still be played with a standard PaintWorks movie player!
Ordering
We accept Visa and MasterCard orders on-line or by phone, and personal checks or school purchase orders by mail. For credit card orders, we can charge exact shipping for our overseas customers. If you need to know oversees shipping in advance, send your name, address, what you are ordering and how you want it shipped (air or surface), and we'll be happy to calculate the shipping charges.
For a printed brochure describing Quick Click Morph, send us your mailing address. Ask about our product list showing other Apple IIGS programs, too! We'll also let you know about other new Apple IIGS programs and special offers in the months to come.

THIS CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2007, APPLE MACINTOSH USERS' GROUP, SYDNEY
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Permission is hereby granted for non-profit user groups to republish this content.
PLEASE CREDIT THE AUTHOR AND THE SOURCE: Applecations, publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia

THIS PAGE COPYRIGHT © 2007, ANDREW ROUGHAN