Fig. 9: You can easily add custom player controls and progress bars with LSP's FastTracks.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Fig. 10: Custom player shapes via LSP's skinning FastTrack open up huge branding possibilities (not to mention just-plain-coolness possibilities as well).

The Flash track: Still the King
The greatest thing about QuickTime, and, by extension, LSP, is the ability to use Flash movies natively as a track. Sadly, QuickTime still only supports Flash 5 SWF files by default, even though Macromedia has had the version 7 spec public for a while now (thanks, Apple!). Even so, there's an amazing amount of synergy between SWF files and QuickTime that LSP lets you take advantage of. For example, you can add ActionScript to objects in Flash, and augment those ActionScripts with QScript directly in LSP (Fig. 11). Plus, using Flash instead of QuickTime's really nasty Tween tracks to handle animated sprites is, in my opinion, always a good idea. Put simply, Flash and LSP make a pretty potent interactive combo, even if you are stuck with Flash 5 SWFs for now.


Fig. 11: You can combine ActionScript with QScript in LSP to create hybrid Flash/QuickTime movies.

QScript
One of the cruddy parts about using various interactive authoring tools is that each one seems to have a different scripting language. It's because of this that I've sometimes clung to a tool longer than I probably would have otherwise, because getting up to speed in a new language is often a gi-normous undertaking. However, I've found that scripting languages like Lingo or ActionScript are getting "JavaScriptier" in nature, making it a little easier to pick up new languages that at least resemble the ECMAScript model. And while QScript, LSP's scripting language, does use JavaScript-like "dot syntax" to construct its scripts, it's different enough to perhaps cause some problems even to veterans of other languages. Fortunately, the QScript Reference panel is a huge timesaver, one which you'll likely discover and use from the giddy-up. In addition to providing detailed usage descriptions of every QScript command organized by function, it also lets you simply drag-and-drop the commands where you need them to go. I've been used to working this way in both Director and Flash for a long time now, and it's good to see a well-thought out implementation of on-demand script reference and implementation in LSP.



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