Off to Adobe Max 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 🙂

Add comment October 22nd, 2006

Director Game Development Survey — Results Have Arrived

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.

2 comments October 17th, 2006

Thought balloons…Survey, 24inch iMac, and Lightroom

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.

4 comments October 11th, 2006

Folding Lingo in BBEdit 8.5

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

Survey on Gaming in Director 11

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.

4 comments September 27th, 2006

Folding Lingo on OSX

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.

lingo script in textmate

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.

lingo script in textmate

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

Two foot iMac

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).

24 inch iMac

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.

7 comments September 6th, 2006

FlashPaper Foils

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 🙂

Add comment September 1st, 2006

Director Losing Barefoot Product Manager

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.

4 comments August 28th, 2006

Director, Math, and Javascript

In DirMX 2004 the ability to have scripts that make use of Javascript rather than Lingo was included. Although I’m from a Lingo background, I have found a few things that are much simpler to do in Javascript.

Lingoworkshop discusses Javascript in Director in terms of dealing with text and encryption. In my line of work one of my big concerns is display of numbers. Just like text, Javascript can help out with this.

In Lingo I’m sure you are used to seeing things such as this in the message window:
the floatPrecision = 4
put 3/4
-- 0
put 3./4
-- 0.7500

The first example is due to division of integers. In a math class 3/4 should not be equal to 0. In the latter example you are left with extra zeros due to the floatPrecision. In both cases I wouldn’t want my output text to show either of those values. I’d really like it to show 0.75.

Along comes Javascript. If you flip your message window over to Javascript you can type the following:
eval(3/4)
0.75
eval(3/5)
0.6
eval(3/7)
0.42857142857142855

This looks much better to the part of my brain that thinks in math. Using eval() makes getting simple expressions for display relatively easy. In Director there are ways to get these nicely formatted numbers, but nothing quite as quick as using the Javascript (from a coding point of view, I’ve never done any tests on the speed of this Javascript within Director).

One real world example where this can be used is in a basic calculator. In this particular case I did a search for “javascript calculator” and found many different implementations of Javascript for this purpose. I took the code and made a few modifications, added a few buttons, and one behavior (in Lingo) to deal with keys getting hit, and the final product can be used to do your taxes…or at least divide 3 by 4 with a nicely displayed number.

Click to view example (pop up window)

Download this example (zip file, 100k)

Add comment August 27th, 2006

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