Posts filed under 'Daily thoughts'
I noticed that The eLearning Guild will be running a two day long online forum on July 19 and 20. It is titled Strategies and Techniques for Building Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS). One of the sessions is titled Building Immersive Learning Simulations Using Flash and Director by Jennifer Jesse and Mike Drebenstedt of D10 Interactive.
…This session on immersive learning will discuss techniques for creating ILEs using Flash and Director. You will see examples of Flash and Director-based ILS as well as examine World of Warcraft, the most successful massively multiplayer online role playing game to date. You will examine the 8 Factors of Immersion that are used in this game and you will see examples of how you can replicate the functionality using Flash and Director. You will see development techniques and platforms used to create multiplayer-task-based gaming, Web-based chat, virtual environments, pedagogical agents, and database integration to store user data and integrate with learning management systems…
I saw this presentation in person earlier this spring and really enjoyed it.
July 8th, 2007
Charles Parcell (a long time Director user) has created a survey about your use of Director in an effort to help the folks at Adobe realize the their target market and Director developers target markets.
If you would please take a few minutes to fill out the survey with as much detail as you can, it would be much appreciated. the survey is 100% anonymous.
Feel free to pass this survey on to others.
Survey Monkey: Director Survey
OK…go for it!
June 13th, 2007
I updated this site earlier today. I noticed my “about me” page is missing. Not sure what is up with that. I think the problem is my really old (by internet standards) theme. I may have to change themes…ugh..big decisions.
Update: Found an updated version of my theme (see link at bottom of page). About me page is back. Now up to WP 2.2. The tough part was that the default RSS feed widget that comes with WP2.2 seems to have a problem with RSS feeds that have a question mark in them. I downloaded the KB Advanced RSS Widget and it has no problem, so the Macromedia Director feed is back on the sidebar.
If anything seems to be broken let me know. Next post…dealing with 300,000 files in one folder…
June 10th, 2007
The planning for Adobe Max 2007 continues, and you can now submit products for the Max Awards. Perhaps Chamber of Chat (a recent Adobe Site of the Day) or Habbo Hotel would stand a chance. Both great Massive Multi-player Role Playing Games. [Note: Briefly reading the awards page I’m not clear if the project had to be made just during this year, or just a project in general.]
The conference will be in Chicago this fall (September 30 – October 3, 2007) and I’m hoping to attend…particularly if they have at least one session related to Director (it has been many years since that has occurred). Requests for a Director session got mentioned in the comments over on the Max 2007 Blog.
May 22nd, 2007
Although Director 11 won’t be out until later this year, Adobe has shown the new icon on the Icon Color Wheel. Some people really liked the new icons, and others weren’t so happy. Luckily, there are many creative people out there, so new icon sets for Adobe CS3 apps have appeared on the web. A few of the sets have stayed ahead of the game and included Director icons. Click on them to see where they came from.
I can’t wait to see the real thing later this year!
May 15th, 2007
I rarely need to record what I see and hear on the screen, but every now and then a reason pops up. I’d used some others in the past, but on my MacIntel I was looking for a Universal program. I stumbled on to iShowU.
iShowU allows you to capture and record anything you can see on your screen, along with audio from a compatible source (like a microphone) as well as any audio from the mac itself.
I recorded my actions while playing Food Force on my 2.16 GHz Intel iMac for more than 30 minutes. If you download Food Force (it was made with Director, so was running in Rosetta-mode) you’ll see that it included a wealth of video, audio, and game play. iShowU had no problem keeping up with it all, and it left a lovely 3 Gig movie sitting on my desktop. Even on my older 1.42 GHz PPC iBook the recording was smooth (although my fan got cranked up a bit).
For just $20 it is hard to beat the price.
May 2nd, 2007
I enjoyed my time at the conference two weeks ago in Boston. I managed to catch a Red Sox game while there, meet up with a few Director folks, and drink a bit of beer.
Most of the sessions I went to were associated with gaming in education. The phrase of the day in eLearning is Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS). They are pretty much what they sound like. Immersive. Learning. Simulation.
A common form of immersion is taking place in massively multiplayer online games. Director is a tool that can be used to create these. Sites created with Director such as Habbo Hotel and MaidMarian were shown. Phosphor was also shown as an example of an amazing 1st person shooter for the web. Many people pointed out that Director really is the best tool for developing 3d web-based worlds.
During several sessions the speakers pointed out that the next version of Director will be coming out later this year. I was hoping the Adobe booth would have CS3 kicking around, but alas, even they didn’t get a copy to play with. While talking about Director I noticed a few people were also asking about an update to Authorware.
It was an interesting experience for me, since I’d never really thought much about the resources involved with the corporate side of eLearning (since I’ve always been on the K to college world). A lot of companies, and a lot of money. A bit shocking compared to the K-12 side of things.
The highlight of the conference though was probably due to Media 1. Their raffle prize was flying toy helicopter. Needless to say, the cute little helicopter now zips through the office near the end of the day. No critical data has been lost 🙂
April 25th, 2007
For the second straight year ExploreLearning won the Codie for the Best Science Instruction Solution.
All the ‘Gizmos’ on our site are created with Adobe Director. Go Gizmos. Go Director.
April 18th, 2007
Every now and then (ok…twice in the past three years) I’ve had a bug that ONLY shows up in Shockwave and not in authoring or projector mode. These are the most frustrating, since it is a bit harder to debug things. One of the toughest parts is that when an error pops up, this is what it looks like.
Not very useful.
Is there a way to get more information? Yes, but finding the answer has gotten harder. One answer is the shockwave.ini file (there are other debug methods for shockwave, but nothing here today). If you do a search for this you will find a bit about this on the web. Most items refer to Windows and not OSX. If you dig around on the Adobe site you will find this technote that discusses making changes to the director.ini file for debugging a projector. It then says you can do this with Shockwave, but trying to find out where to put that file seems to be missing from the Adobe site (even a search for shockwave.ini does not seem to provide an answer, although more can be found out about the Director.ini file).
Are you starting to wonder where this file should go? Lets get started. Go to this location on your computer (note: This is not in your user folder, it is the top level library folder):
/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Shockwave 10/
You will then see a file called a Shockwave.bundle. Control-click on that bundle and select “Show Package Contents” from the list of options.
You will then be inside the Contents folder. Inside that is a folder called MacOS. That is where the shockave.ini* file will need to sit with the line DisplayFullLingoErrorText=1 placed in it.
You will then get errors when running in Shockwave that are a bit easier to deal with. Guess I was missing a handler that would help me find an answer (ugh..such a bad joke..it even hurts me).
When the next version of Shockwave gets released I have a feeling it will no longer go in a Macromedia folder, so I guess I’ll have to dig around to find yet another place to put my shockwave.ini file.
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*It is best to make a copy of the director.ini file and rename it shockwave.ini (for Director 10). The director.ini file is located in the Director/Configuration folder (typically /Applications/Macromedia Director/Configuration/director.ini). You can find more info about that file in Adobe Technote 3108.
April 1st, 2007
Developers continue to wait for a MacIntel-compatible version of the Shockwave Plug-in and Director. Adobe has stated that they are working on this issue. The Intel-Macs were introduced more than a year ago (Jan 10, 2006) and I continue to look at stats to see what percentage of users are running MacIntels (I use Google Analytics for stats).
January was the first month where the percentage of hits on this site from MacIntels beat up on the old school PPCs. 55% of the Mac hits on this site were MacIntels. It is clear that the number of MacIntels is rapidly rising in the development sector, and I was rather surprised that the number has gone up as quickly as it has.
On some other sites I’m associated with the percentage of Macs that are Intel-based varies from 1% to 10%. In my office 50% of our Macs are now Intel-based (at least those that are in use…we never want to throw a Mac away…like my PowerBook 1400).
I’m still patiently waiting for the Universal Binary version of the plug-in. Please. Pretty please.
February 12th, 2007
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