Posts filed under 'Daily thoughts'
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
If you’ve got a bit of time this weekend and want to do some quick Director coding there is a challenge that is right up your alley.
Rules:
The 48-Hour Game Programming Competition is a “mostly from scratch”, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme.
IMPORTANT:
The whole point of competing in the LD48 competition is to challenge yourself to write a game, from scratch, by yourself, in 48 hours. That’s what we old-timers call the “spirit” of the competition.
If you’ve got a question regarding any of these rules – see whether thinking about the above statement will answer the question for you.
The details:
Starting: April 28 2006 8:00 PM US Pacific (April 29 2006 3:00 AM UTC)
Ending: April 30 2006 8:00 PM US Pacific (May 1 2006 3:00 AM UTC)
You will have to submit your source code, but for a quick game it could be fun. If the theme is physics I have a feeling I’ll come up with something 🙂
April 27th, 2006
A bit of a sad day in the Director community. The DirectorWeb site has gone in to hibernation and will no longer be updated. It will remain up for historical purposes.
Back in 1994 I was trying to learn Director and stumbled on to the site. It was so long ago I have no clue what search engine I used, but my guess is I found it on Yahoo (back when they had the “new site of the day” with about five sites/day). Without the site I never would have been able to learn as much Lingo as I have. I have a feeling I never would have gotten ExploreLearning started as a company.
A million thanks to Alan Levine for having maintained the site for so many years, and thanks to those that helped the site grow during that time. Twelve years for one web site. Amazing.
April 19th, 2006
I do almost all my work in the web-based world of Shockwave and use shared casts. If the content is not placed in a path that includes a “dswmedia” folder the shared cast content can’t be loaded (see Technote 15497) when you are trying to preview the media locally.
I’ve worked with lots of dswmedia subfolders on my hard drive over the years, but finally just went ahead and changed the name of my HD to dswmedia. Now everything sits inside my dswmedia folder (such as /dswmedia/Users/raman/Desktop/funstuff/demo.dcr).
I’ve thought about doing this for years, but always like to have HD’s with more entertaining names such as Spock’s Brain. Dswmedia is not as much fun as Spock, but I’m learning to live with it.
This of course was on OSX where all paths start with the volume (named dswmedia in my case). On Windows can you rename your HD dswmedia so you could do the same thing, or will it always have to start with a single letter? I don’t know the answer to that one.
April 17th, 2006
3D is one of those things that can be done with Director and is very hard to do with other tools when you want web-based content with a common plug-in. Here are two examples, one for fun and the other for a real-world application. I have never been to the Quake world, but I did live in Miami for many years. Rumor has it there is a 12 headed hydra in the Quake demo.
In SuperTour you can walk down several beaches and walk in to hotels. The scenery has changed quite a bit since I was there in 1987. Several of the bars in the hotels on SuperTour site look more my style than the Quake rooms, and I don’t think there are any hydra(s?).
QUAKE 3 Forever (demo v0.5)
The new game engine in action (test map):
– advanced SW realtime lighting & lightmaps
– complex geometry & hi-res textures
– decent frame rate on entry-level machines (!)
– file size: 1.25 MB
SuperTour is a travel portal site that uses Shockwave to present users an interactive product demonstration of hotels and travel destinations. With SuperTour, users can navigate virtual walks from the beach to the hotel lobby, and to the rooms, creating a more compelling experience for travelers and enabling hoteliers to showcase their hotel properties in greater detail.
April 14th, 2006
What is the #1 most popular programming language? Which language are you most familiar with?
According to TIOBE Software Lingo sits at #45 in the overall rankings. Is that good or bad? Using the fact that the ratings are based on “the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors,” do you think it is an accurate representation?
Java sits at number 1. Actionscript at 32. I’ve only had one computer class in my entire life and that was Fortran on punch cards (how many actually remember those?). Fortran sits there at 21.
Interesting tidbit. As a non-sequiter connection, the 45th most populous country in 2005 was Venezuela. In 2000 it was Iraq.
April 5th, 2006
In the most recent Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Developer Center Newsletter there is a great article about the development of a SCORM based Presentation Engine. One of the best things about the article is how it tries to clarify exactly what all this SCORM mumbo-jumbo really is, since the term flies around a lot, but people often say ‘huh’?
March 10th, 2006
A few weeks back I got to play with Shockwave on one of the new Intel iMacs running under Rosetta. It had a rather snappy feel, and for the content I typically create it was more than adequate.
The downside was that the screen had a rather large defect near the bottom, so it immediately got sent back to Apple for a new one. Eventually it made it back. Today I confirmed that once again the Shockwave is snappy. Then I decided to take a shot at seeing how Director felt.
One word: SLOW. I didn’t get to play with it for very long. Basic tasks such as dragging sprite around, editing scripts, naming members, etc. seemed to run at a decent pace, but hitting the play button to test the movie was really painful. It would typically sit there for about 3 seconds before doing much in a movie that had nothing in it other than a text member and a go to the frame statement in it.
In defense of Director I will point out that the iMac I was using only had the base 512 meg of RAM. Director has always been a bit RAM hungry (as are most all multimedia tools), and combine that with OSX 10.4 itself and Rosetta and it makes sense that the poor iMac would feel pain. I think I also had Safari (in Rosetta) running in the background.
If I get a chance I’ll try to watch RAM usage next time I boot up Director on it. Right now it is primarily a testing machine for the content I work on. It would also be nice to see how it would do if the RAM was maxed out.
I’ll probably be buying a new iMac for home in the near future, but will get the full RAM. I’ll let you know how that goes when I finally get my taxes done to see if I get the new computer this year. No matter what, I’ll then be living with Director in Rosetta at home.
For additional info, here is another story from Developer Dispatch on the new Intel Macs that got posted earlier today.
March 8th, 2006
With the recent introduction of new Intel-based Macs, the upcoming Flash Xtra, the permanently under development Windows Vista (and its six versions), the multiple versions of the Shockwave plug-in, and the myriad of browsers out there, I was thinking it would really be nice to have a Shockwave benchmark test out there somewhere.
Does anyone already have one or know of one?
Finding/creating one that tests a wealth of the features in Director would be very useful. Much of the work I do is not a real stress on most computers, and the things I most worry about are vectorShapes and the speed of lingo when dealing with lists and various math functions. Others have to deal with the much more demanding 3D stuff and imaging lingo. But testing on new systems is always needed.
It would also be great if the test could send the results back to a database with some basic system info just so you get an idea if your computer is out of the ordinary.
I dug around and found a few tests out there:
I’ll put a simple one together for my own testing in the next few days (and put that up here), since I recently got a new Intel-based iMac at work for compatibility checks and such. It will be interesting to see how it does when running under Rosetta in Safari.
If anyone knows of any other tests out there, drop me a line at multimediaguy at gmail.
March 5th, 2006
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