Dean Utian created a survey related to how you use Director, especially if you do much with games. He’d love it if you could fill it out if you get a few moments.
The survey can be found here: http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/learning/director/survey/games/form.asp
From Dean: There aren’t too many questions. Be sure to mention where you heard about the survey in Question 11 [Director@Night]. Would be great if you can leave your name and email to give integrity to the survey (so I can remove the obvious dud posts). If you leave your email, I’ll send you the preliminary results, which will be in about 2 weeks.
September 27th, 2006
I’ve been using BBEdit for a dozen years or so and make extensive use of the program for many daily tasks (grep stuff, misc. html editing, etc.). A rather powerful tool for specific needs.
For BBEdit/Lingo coding there has been a way to colorize your scripts using a Language plug-in written by Avacast. I’ve never used external scripts when working with Director, but I occasionally copy and paste a script in to an external editor, make my changes, and then copy/paste it back in to Director. The colorized text in BBEdit has always been nice.
BareBones released BBEdit v8.5 last week and one of the new features is code folding. That feature would be pretty nice for dealing with long lingo scripts! It was mentioned on a mailing list that Lingo didn’t seem to be folding so I decided to take a look. It definitely didn’t seem to fold. It seems as if the language plug-in will need to be updated, and the new plug-in SDK hasn’t yet been released.
Since that one isn’t quite ready yet I decided to take a look at TextMate which I’d seen mentioned in a MacDevCenter post.
I played with TextMate for a few minutes. The program supports a large number of programming languages and has a wealth of features associated with each language. The program is extremely flexible for editing language syntax and extension of features! On their site I noticed that Lingo had been requested, but no one had taken time to create a Lingo “Bundle.”
One thing about Lingo is that the structure is a bit like AppleScript, so rather than spending time working on creating a Lingo bundle I just chose AppleScript as the syntax and started typing.
The script took on some color, and is being automatically indented. For some things autocompletion kicks in. Of course my entire reason for looking at the program was for code folding, and as you can see, it does a rather good job with lingo code.
I’m really impressed with TextMate and may end up getting a copy just to have around when editing a few scripts. Maybe the next version of Director will have a much better script editor 😉
September 11th, 2006
It has been about four years since I got a new computer at home. The rumor sites had been talking about an iMac upgrade for the past few months and I managed to hold out until today.
I ordered one of those brand-spanking new 24 inch iMacs. This will be my first Intel-based Mac (other than a testing machine I use at work), and my first one that isn’t capable of running “Classic” apps (not that I have tried that in a few years…other than Fontographer and FrameMaker at work).
I sure hope a Universal Binary version of the Shockwave plug-in shows up in the near future…I really don’t want to have to run in Rosetta all day, or look at the big white square that shows up in place of Shockwave media. Please. Pretty please.
September 6th, 2006
Although I heard of FlashPaper I’d never actually had a need to use it. I recently found a good reason to do so and the first thing I did was drag the swf file in to my Director cast and slap it on the stage. It was rather small.
I dragged to expand it and low and behold, it started doing weird things. Google however rapidly came to the rescue (I’m amazed at how often my desired result is one of the first three links) with a great article on the Macromedia (now Adobe) Director Developer Center.
Using FlashPaper in Macromedia Director by Chuck Neal.
Worthwhile if you plan to use that newfangled flashy paper. Now one might ask why I used the word Macromedia above. I just noticed that none of the page titles have been updated. I’m sure that is on the list of things to do, since the merger was certainly rather large. I do know from experience though that page titles are often overlooked when testing sites. While doing QA I’m renowned for my griping about titles 🙂
September 1st, 2006