Posts filed under 'Daily thoughts'
I’ll be honest, of all the new things Apple has announced since the first iMac, this session today had to be the worst. The boombox is straight out of the late 70’s, and the new Mac Mini still isn’t designed to do any decent video. A year and three months ago Steve Jobs said this was the year of HD, and I have yet to see that come to light. At least set up the Mac Mini so it can run cable tv through it to the TV.
Is Apple turning down again? Hard to say. I know that I’ll be buying a 20inch iMac in the very near future as a new home computer. My old dual G4 is getting long in the tooth.
February 28th, 2006
Years ago when I was working on a CD I needed a way to grab a copy of the screen and get it in to the cast so the user could do something with it. That was pre-OSX and I used to use the ScrnXtra with Director 5 and 6. Many moons ago.
I saw a posting in the Macromedia forums and I started wondering about ways to do a screen grab. I remembered the Shell Xtra by Valentin Schmidt. This might be one of the most powerful Xtras out there, although since I do pure Shockwave for education sort of work I have always avoided Xtras.
I downloaded the Xtra, did a quick google search for ‘capture clipboard shell osx’ and the first link gave me the answer. With the demo file provided by Valentin I just entered the phrase
screencapture -c -m
The clipboard could then be put in a cast member for further processing. If you wanted to create files you could use other commands to do a screencapture straight to a file.
Pretty nifty.
February 27th, 2006
While working on the best way to put up sample dcr files for viewing on this site I tried to upload a dcr but I was rejected by WordPress. In pre 2.0 versions of WP uploads were handled on an upload page where you had the option to add new file types. This option has been removed (as far as I could tell) in WP2.
To get around this so you can easily upload dcr files you just have to open the wordpress/wp-admin/admin-functions.php file and add the dcr file type to the allowed types for uploading.
If you open that file, search for the line containing the swf file type (near the bottom), and add the dcr type below it, so it looks like this.
'swf' => 'application/x-shockwave-flash',
'dcr' => 'application/x-director',
I tested it once, so it must be OK…right? Now I’m playing with a popup window solution for displaying these, a ‘menu’ system of some sort, or just a direct link to the dcr. Since the last sounds easiest, I have a feeling I’ll go with that one. Simplicity…often the best answer.
February 26th, 2006
For those that enjoy listening to a podcast on occasion, and do a bit of work with Director (why else would you be here?), you can drop by and listen to a Magicgate Software Macromedia Director Podcast.
I’m so old school I’ve never actually listened to a podcast yet, but maybe I’ll give one of these a try tomorrow.
February 23rd, 2006
From Tom Higgins blog:
The new Flash 8 Asset Xtra will allow developers to incorporate Flash 8 authored SWF files into their Director projects in order to tap into the new Flash player features like the improved Flash video codec and the imaging filter effects. This new Flash 8 Asset Xtra will also expose a new function/sprite method named “convert”, that function converts between Lingo image objects and Flash bitmapdata objects as well as between Lingo linear lists and Flash array values. There are plans to expand the convert() method/funtion over time but for now it’s focused on only a few data types.
Good thing I’m starting to learn a bit of Flash, since it does have a few nifty things that Director doesn’t. Together they make a great tool.
Read the full post for more information.
February 20th, 2006
What are your favorite source for info about Director? Where do you go when you need an answer on a tough Lingo question? Where do you go if you are just starting out with Director?
Tom Higgins posed the question on his blog, so get over there and let him know what you think.
February 17th, 2006
Two great articles in the past 24 hours over at the Lingoworkshop. Be sure to read up on Xtras and Standard Practices.
The standard practices article is pretty good. I do a few things a bit differently (future posts!) but nothing major. One things I seem to do far less than others when doing the actual coding is globals. When working on my own stuff I haven’t used a global since behaviors were introduced in Director 6, but I’ll get in to my reasoning on that one day.
I got in to a good discussion the other day about using duplicate(). I realized I don’t think I’ve ever used it, and we debated exactly when/where/how it should get used. I’m still looking forward to using it someday! (and yes…I do use lists all the time)
Other than a Fortran class I had that used punch cards (one of the last U’s here in America that used them) I’ve never had a programming class, so maybe I’m a bit out there. Oh well, Director keeps paying the bills, so I won’t complain.
February 16th, 2006
Still many things to get done on the site. I added some cute little icons for various types of links/files that go up in the future. Have played with the RSS feeder plug-in so I can pull in headlines from a few places (going live later this week). I got the Akismet plug-in running to deal with comment spam. I still have a bunch of links to add. I also need to put up my email address or a contact form up. Getting email up sounds like the easiest thing to do so I bet I go with that option.
After all that maybe I’ll have time to actually start getting a few posts up on occasion. And maybe getting a little contest for fun (see prior Sudoku post).
February 14th, 2006
There is currently a good ongoing discussion on Direct-L mailing list related to the massively popular game called Sudoku. From Wikipedia:
Sudoku, sometimes spelled Su Doku, is a logic-based placement puzzle, also known as Number Place in the United States. The aim of the canonical puzzle is to enter a numerical digit from 1 through 9 in each cell of a 9×9 grid made up of 3×3 subgrids (called “regions”), starting with various digits given in some cells (the “givens”). Each row, column, and region must contain only one instance of each numeral.
Several on the list have presented ways to solve and create these puzzles in Lingo. There are already many other solutions (open source, shareware, commercial) that let you do such things (see Wikipedia link).
One thing that might be fun is trying to see who could create the “fastest” code for both creating and solving a puzzle. Anyone up for this challenge? We’d have to set up some rules for this contest of course…something to think about in the near future.
I’ve never been much of a puzzle solver, but thinking about the math/coding behind such things is often fun.
February 14th, 2006
Google link. Google amazes me. Or scares me. I’m not yet sure.
February 9th, 2006
Next Posts
Previous Posts