Introduction

In 1976 Tim Severin set out from Ireland with some doughty companions in a leather-covered boat to sail or rather, hoping to be driven by wind and current across the North Atlantic. His objective was to inject some reality into the intriguing legends of the sixth-century Irish monk St. Brendan, who was supposed to have visited America hundreds of years before Columbus. Amongst many adventures before their eventual landfall in Newfoundland, Severin recounts several thrilling encounters with ice: deceptively small and benign-looking above the water but deadly below, especially when all that separates you from the cold sea is a quarter-inch-thick skin of cowhide. ^[1]

So far in the last two chapters we have been paddling around carefully studying the most obvious features of the QuickTime Control the bits above the water. But every now and again, we ve stumbled across something like the Movie object, hinting at greater things below. In this chapter we get to grips with the underlying library of QuickTime objects that lies beneath the surface.

Before getting down to the detail, we should pause to acquaint or perhaps reacquaint ourselves with the concept of an object model. If you are already familiar with object models, such as the Document Object Model (DOM), you may choose to skip over the next section.

Object Models

One of the most useful concepts to come out of the object-oriented programming paradigm is that of the object model. An object model is essentially...