For those of you that run OSX Spotlight as a search tool is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it seems useful, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you wonder what the hell was Apple thinking.1
One thing that is very useful is the RavWare Director Spotlight Plugin. This allows indexing of all my .dir and .cst files sitting on my computer. When I recall that I wrote a behavior/handler to integrate a function (all that geeky math stuff) I could use spotlight to search for the word ‘integrate’ and there is a very good chance my Director file will appear among the results.
I’ve been using it since the day it came out, and find it worth every penny — it is a mere $10.99!
1 As a side note to Spotlight, I often use EasyFind when doing basic searches.
June 25th, 2006
Looks as though there is a new agreement between Adobe/Director and Google for the Shockwave Player. From my point of view, this can only be a good thing, since I don’t think Google would go in for an agreement with a company/product they didn’t feel was worthwhile. From Tom Higgins blog posting:
Adobe values both Director and the Shockwave Player as important technologies and is interested in ensuring their continued success going forward. We feel that partnerships such as this expand opportunities for Director and Shockwave Player, and the company as a whole.
I’m looking forward to future success!
June 21st, 2006
One of the things I did want to do was modify my WordPress installation so I could upload a dcr file, and also so I could quickly post that dcr so it would show up in a pop up window without me having to enter much info when editing my post. After a bit of research I figured out how to do that (see below about my web-ignorance).
Click for pop up window.
Now, does this work on all browsers/platforms? Will it work with that new M$ security patch in IE6 and the new IE7? Hmm…I think I’ll worry about that at a later time.
To get this to work I edited my header.php file and added this script just after the </head> tag (via the WordPress > Dashboard > Presentation interface).
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
function popUpDCRWindow(aW, aH, sW, sH, aFile)
{
newwindow2=window.open('','name','height='+aH+',width='+aW+'');
var tmp = newwindow2.document;
tmp.write('<html><head><title>a preview window</title>');
tmp.write('</head><body bgcolor=#A3C159>');
tmp.write('<p><center>');
tmp.write('<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:166B1BCA-3F9C-11CF-8075-444553540000"');
tmp.write('CODEBASE="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/
shockwave/cabs/director/sw.cab#version=8,5,1,0"');
tmp.write('WIDTH="'+sW+'" HEIGHT="'+sH+'">');
tmp.write('<PARAM NAME="SRC" VALUE="'+aFile+'">');
tmp.write('<EMBED SRC="'+aFile+'" WIDTH='+sW+' HEIGHT='+sH+' TYPE="application/x-director" PLUGINSPAGE=');
tmp.write('"http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/">');
tmp.write('</EMBED>');
tmp.write('</OBJECT>');
tmp.write('</center></p></body></html>');
tmp.close();
}
// -->
</script>
When I am writing a post I can upload a dcr file (see prior post about adding file types to WP) and am then presented with the options.
I make the selections shown in the picture, and then ‘Send to editor.’ When I do that I get this placed in the current posting:
<a id="p50" href="http://www.directoratnight.com/wp-content
/uploads/2006/06/popup_test.dcr">popup_test.dcr</a>
I make a few quick edits to that and covert it to:
<a href="javascript:popUpDCRWindow(600, 300, 320, 240, 'http://www.directoratnight.com/wp-content
/uploads/2006/06/popup_test.dcr')">Click for pop up window.</a>
The numbers in the javascript call represent the pop-up window width, height, dcr width, and dcr height. Is this a good solution? I’m sure there is a better way, but I’ll stick with this for now. If anyone has a simpler method, feel free to drop me a line. This one is at least simple enough for the day.
—————————
Back in the old days of 1993 — 1995 I was pretty good as a web guy. I knew the five or six different things you could do in HTML and by 1995 I could even do Shockwave. Now I’m more or less crushed by HTML. To do nifty stuff you need to know PHP, MySql, CFM, and/or a wealth of other stuff.
Thus, for my web presence I more or less live with things such as WordPress (but still enjoy tinkering with it). The people that work on blogging tools do such a good job that I don’t find it productive to spend my own time on such things, but playing with Director is still fun 🙂
Note: Several lines of the code in this post had breaks put in them for layout.
June 14th, 2006
For those that develop Shockwave content it is often useful to have an older version of the plug-in kicking around for testing purposes. After doing a bit of digging I managed to find these on the Adobe site.
For those interested, you can drop by this technote.
They only go back to version 6…but that is pretty far back!
June 12th, 2006