Archive for May, 2006
Is this a picture of me at the latest club dancing the night away? I can’t say it is, but it is a picture from a project that was recently completed using Director located at Cadbury World across the lake in Birmingham, UK.
The development team at HMC Media Lab used 3 computers networked together with a shock sensitive floor and motion tracking to make interactive chocolatey graphics at Cadburys World theme park in the UK. Director was used to create “custom software from the ground up and installed it across three computer processors at the nerve centre of the installation.”
As you enter the infinity room a giant chocolate bar melts into gloopy puddles beneath you and, when you jump in them, chocolate splashes all over the floor. Then a sprinkling of individual Roses chocolates appear beneath your feet. You won’t believe your eyes when they unwrap as you tread on them but as you step off they wrap back up.
I’m always amazed by what one can do with Director. Now, if I make it over to to the UK I’ll be sure to stop by. Mmmm…..chocolate — Homer Simpson.
May 23rd, 2006
ExploreLearning won a Codie Award last night in the Best Instructional Solution: Science category. The only reason this is of interest here is that ExploreLearning creates all its Gizmos (online multimedia content) with Adobe Director. Oh yeah, I also work for EL 😉
May 17th, 2006
Are you ever working with Director and you want to use something that is in the menu, but has no keyboard shortcut? I often find myself trying to get to the menu, but when using multiple large monitors for development it sure takes a lot of mouse motion to get over to them.
I stumbled on a lovely little utility (OSX) that lets you pull up the entire list of menu item in Director (or any other program) just by hitting a keyboard combination. It runs in the background and makes life a bit simpler in a few situations.
Homepage for DejaMenu for MacOSX.
May 11th, 2006
As the merger between Macromedia and Adobe continues the transition advances. If you try to go to macromedia.com you will now be redirected to Adobe.com. For the past months there has been no image of the Shockwave plug-in on the front page of MM (or Adobe), but the logo has returned to the front page on the lower left side. Although not featured in the upper left with Flash and Acrobat Reader, it is at least an image now!
Now, what exactly will this do to all the links various companies have to the Shockave plug-in? In recent weeks the reliability of the download of the players on the site have been a bit flaky. Will the new redirects solve these problems. For my morning project I’ll be checking out of few of the new redirects, and seeing where to point users for the Shockwave download.
May 1st, 2006