Posts filed under 'Daily thoughts'
OK…after a 12 hour journey I made it to Vegas (my first time here). I was asleep shortly thereafter. At the opening keynote this morning Flash got mentioned as now being a great product to go along with all the other stellar Adobe products such as Photoshop, yada, Director, yada, and yada. I was surprised (and happy) that Director was one of just a few products mentioned.
This is the biggest MAX ever. The Blue Man Group did the opening ceremony. Fresh fruit at the breakfast buffet was pretty good. Very fancy hotel. I haven’t even left it yet…maybe tonight. It is almost a city all by itself.
October 24th, 2006
Early in the morning I’m heading off to Adobe Max 2006. I know a few Director people will be there and I’m looking forward to meeting them. I haven’t been to a Macromedia/Adobe workshop since 2001, so I’m looking forward to this, although the fact that there are zero sessions related to Director is disturbing.
Hopefully a few of us Director folks will find time to do our own Birds of a Feather session. I noticed that several people are posting images to Flickr related to the conference. If you do a search for adobemax2006 (or some combination of those things) you’ll probably find a few things.
At least one group has been set up for images from the conference. I’ll try to post a few, but won’t make it there until late on Monday. Hopefully security won’t yank my batteries or anything 🙂
October 22nd, 2006
For those that are interested, Dean Utian conducted a survey related to game development using Adobe Director.
The total number of responses was 227. However, not all responded to every question. While this is a relatively small sample group, there were clear trends in the wishes of users.
To see all the interesting results, drop by and see the full results of the survey.
October 17th, 2006
For those that missed it the first time around all you Director users should head over and take a short survey about features you would like to see in Director 11 (and of course versions above and beyond that). This is the final week to get in your answers, so don’t miss out!
In the past few weeks I’ve been slowly working on getting my gorgeous 24 inch iMac getting all set up in the evening. The first thing I did was get the latest MySql and PHP running (will post this info later this week), along with WordPress. Total time was about 20 minutes. Time watching the big iMac screen…priceless. The screen on this thing really is amazing.
With my nice new big screen I have started playing with Adobe Lightroom (I’m one of those pro-am photographers…although mostly on the ‘am’ side). I’d briefly played with it on my 14inch iBook and it wasn’t a very rewarding experience, but with a lot of screen real estate on this fast iMac it is fantastic. I think I’ll be buying it as soon as it has made it out of beta. I’m not yet sure how it will integrate with CS3 (when that comes out next year). One thing missing from it right now is an easy way to get photos up to Flickr. From the looks of it they will be counting on 3rd party developers to provide a lot of these add-ons.
October 11th, 2006
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
Tom Higgins posted in his blog that he’ll be leaving his position at Adobe next week. In the post Tom said Adobe tried to keep him with the Director/Shockwave team, but he is ready to head in a new direction.
Several new members of the Director/Shockwave team were introduced. I hope they are ready to hear all the varied opinions from us crazy developers, and that they can be as energetic and communicative as Tom has been over the past years.
Tom, thanks for putting years of energy in to Director! May your next chapter be fun, exciting, and successful.
If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
— Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), Observer, Jan. 15, 1950.
August 28th, 2006
For the first time since 1999 I’ll be heading off to Adobe MAX in Las Vegas in October. They don’t have a single Director session, but hopefully a few of us Director folks can get together and do some chatting. If we are lucky, maybe we’ll get a look at an early version of the new and improved Director that will be released next year. I’m also looking forward to CS3 for Intel Macs getting released, so maybe they’ll give us a sneak peek at those.
I’m planning on learning a bit of Flash/Actionscript 3 and CSS while I’m out there. If there are any sessions related to photography and workflow sort of things I’ll look in to those.
Hope to meet up with some of you other Director people while I’m out there.
August 12th, 2006
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