In the short post the other day I’d glanced at the new folding feature in BBEdit. For those that didn’t catch the comment by Alex da Franca, he has put together a CLM for BBEdit so you can ‘fold’ the code while editing a lingo script.
Seems to work! Thanks a lot.
2 comments October 2nd, 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 😉
2 comments September 11th, 2006
For those of you that run OSX Spotlight as a search tool is a mixed blessing. Sometimes it seems useful, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes you wonder what the hell was Apple thinking.1
One thing that is very useful is the RavWare Director Spotlight Plugin. This allows indexing of all my .dir and .cst files sitting on my computer. When I recall that I wrote a behavior/handler to integrate a function (all that geeky math stuff) I could use spotlight to search for the word ‘integrate’ and there is a very good chance my Director file will appear among the results.
I’ve been using it since the day it came out, and find it worth every penny — it is a mere $10.99!
1 As a side note to Spotlight, I often use EasyFind when doing basic searches.
1 comment June 25th, 2006
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.
5 comments May 11th, 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.
1 comment April 14th, 2006
For those that use Director you have probably run across the name James Newton. He recently updated his Nonlinear Notes for Developers site.
This site brings together in one place all the material that I have developed to help other Director users create great things. The Tutorials section includes articles that I have published but which are no longer in print. The Tips section contains a number of simple movies written in answer to questions on Director-oriented mailing lists or fora. No explicit explanations are given, but the code used is simple and well-enough commented for you to work out how it functions. The Articles section contains links to material published elsewhere on the Internet. The Resources section contains links to other sites that I personally find useful.
Exceedingly useful goodies! Thanks a million James.
Add comment March 24th, 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.
Add comment February 16th, 2006
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