Back in 1996 there was an After Dark (I think) screensaver that morphed vector-like figures from one Olympic sport in to another, such as swimmer to a volleyball player. If I had the energy/time I’d look around on a backup CD for that one just to grab an image (if of course I could get OS8 or 9 up and running). Screensavers have mostly faded away with the exception of that really cool spinning 3D RSS Visualizer and the iTunes cover art on OSX. Anyway (enough reminiscing), I never forgot that screensaver and loved how things morphed.
When vectorShapes made it in to Director 7 I immediately started using them. They made such nice anti-aliased lines and curves (or is that aliased…which ever is the pretty one). For making graphs and such in math and science they are unbelievably useful.
One issue that many Director users have when first starting to use vectorShapes is when the registration point seems to shift around as you change the vertexList. There are proper things to do, but this covers a little trick that I use. One of the first things I noticed is that you could have two vertexPoints in your vector, and if they were less than 0.5 pixels apart that line wouldn’t show up in the vectorShape member. Nifty!
If you use this fact you can draw an invisible line in one corner of a rectangle, and another invisible line in the opposite corner (using the #newCurve feature of vectorShapes). You can then start adding any new shapes you want. Just be sure you never have a point that goes “outside” your rectangular region.
In this example I set up several key data sets that will be my “shapes” that I will morph. In this case I just used 4 points. I do a few loops to move them from one shape to the next (by extrapolating between the current shape and the one it is morphing towards). When it gets to the final shape it starts working back to the first shape (and vice versa). One thing I do is flip the y value in sign before I add the data to the vertexList. In science I always need a positive value of y to be upward (otherwise the world would be upside down!).
There is a much more complete article on Director Online that covers a lot of the morphing behavior, so jump over there for some code that is a bit cleaner than mine 🙂
Click to view example (pop up window)
Download this example (zip file, 28k)
August 22nd, 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
Like many other Mac zealots I sat around with live text/image feeds from MacRumors (plus a few other sites) yesterday as Steve Jobs gave his sneak preview of OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard). The two things that got my attention (besides the new Mac Pro) were the backup feature of called Time Machine, and the inclusion of virtual screens called Spaces.
Both features sure look pretty.
I’m wondering how well Director will work with both of these. Currently I use virtual screens all the time. Sometimes I use Desktop Manager, and other times I use the more recent product of VirtueDesktops. Both are products are donation ware. Both have minor issues when using programs such as Director due to the fact that there are so many individual little windows that can float around, but even with the bugs the virtual world is high on my list of necessities. Combining all this with Expose will be even more fun.
The funniest part of the Time Machine was pointed out by a reader (Christian Kent) of Macintouch:
They demonstrate ‘lost contacts’ in the Address Book app, by doing a
search for the name ‘Rose’. They say that Time Machine ‘can even
reunite you with old friends’. This can’t be a coincidence — the most
famous time traveller on TV, Doctor Who, has just stopped travelling
with his companion, Rose, a month ago.
I loved the new season of Dr. Who. I can’t wait until the Season 2 DVD’s are released.
August 8th, 2006
Bruce Chizen, the CEO of Adobe, was interviewed by the New York Times this past weekend. The Shockwave plug-in was mentioned. I find that a rather positive thing, since no one from Adobe/Macromedia had mentioned Shockwave in recent years, and I often wondered if they were still aware of it. From the interview:
Q. You recently announced a partnership with Google, which is in a fierce battle with Microsoft in the Web search market. Was this a case of two players joining forces?
A. It had nothing to do with either of our relationships with Microsoft. It just made a lot of sense. We have significant reach to the user if you look at the Shockwave client, the Adobe Reader client, the Adobe Flash Player client, and Google wanted to have access to those customers.
Although I enjoyed that snippet the first paragraph of the article referred to “Adobe digesting Macromedia.” I don’t know if I’d like to be digested…
August 8th, 2006
Wow, I was gone for a week and all sort of Director news made it in to the world. Director lives! Tom Higgins posted a few comments in my prior post. Quick summary of links:
Posting on Tom Higgins blog
Interview with Tom Higgins
Director gets mentioned on MacNN
Director used in development of OSX (mentioned in Q & A session at SxSW Conference)
July 31st, 2006
From a mailing list I’m not on (I can’t believe it!) I see that the next version of Director was confirmed by Tom Higgins. You can see what was said in the mailing list message on this blog.
2007 is sounding better every day.
July 9th, 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 $10.99!
1 As a side note to Spotlight, I often use EasyFind when doing basic searches.
June 25th, 2006
Looks as though there is a new agreement between Adobe/Director and Google for the Shockwave Player. From my point of view, this can only be a good thing, since I don’t think Google would go in for an agreement with a company/product they didn’t feel was worthwhile. From Tom Higgins blog posting:
Adobe values both Director and the Shockwave Player as important technologies and is interested in ensuring their continued success going forward. We feel that partnerships such as this expand opportunities for Director and Shockwave Player, and the company as a whole.
I’m looking forward to future success!
June 21st, 2006
One of the things I did want to do was modify my WordPress installation so I could upload a dcr file, and also so I could quickly post that dcr so it would show up in a pop up window without me having to enter much info when editing my post. After a bit of research I figured out how to do that (see below about my web-ignorance).
Click for pop up window.
Now, does this work on all browsers/platforms? Will it work with that new M$ security patch in IE6 and the new IE7? Hmm…I think I’ll worry about that at a later time.
To get this to work I edited my header.php file and added this script just after the </head> tag (via the WordPress > Dashboard > Presentation interface).
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
function popUpDCRWindow(aW, aH, sW, sH, aFile)
{
newwindow2=window.open('','name','height='+aH+',width='+aW+'');
var tmp = newwindow2.document;
tmp.write('<html><head><title>a preview window</title>');
tmp.write('</head><body bgcolor=#A3C159>');
tmp.write('<p><center>');
tmp.write('<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:166B1BCA-3F9C-11CF-8075-444553540000"');
tmp.write('CODEBASE="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/
shockwave/cabs/director/sw.cab#version=8,5,1,0"');
tmp.write('WIDTH="'+sW+'" HEIGHT="'+sH+'">');
tmp.write('<PARAM NAME="SRC" VALUE="'+aFile+'">');
tmp.write('<EMBED SRC="'+aFile+'" WIDTH='+sW+' HEIGHT='+sH+' TYPE="application/x-director" PLUGINSPAGE=');
tmp.write('"http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/">');
tmp.write('</EMBED>');
tmp.write('</OBJECT>');
tmp.write('</center></p></body></html>');
tmp.close();
}
// -->
</script>
When I am writing a post I can upload a dcr file (see prior post about adding file types to WP) and am then presented with the options.
I make the selections shown in the picture, and then ‘Send to editor.’ When I do that I get this placed in the current posting:
<a id="p50" href="http://www.directoratnight.com/wp-content
/uploads/2006/06/popup_test.dcr">popup_test.dcr</a>
I make a few quick edits to that and covert it to:
<a href="javascript:popUpDCRWindow(600, 300, 320, 240, 'http://www.directoratnight.com/wp-content
/uploads/2006/06/popup_test.dcr')">Click for pop up window.</a>
The numbers in the javascript call represent the pop-up window width, height, dcr width, and dcr height. Is this a good solution? I’m sure there is a better way, but I’ll stick with this for now. If anyone has a simpler method, feel free to drop me a line. This one is at least simple enough for the day.
—————————
Back in the old days of 1993 — 1995 I was pretty good as a web guy. I knew the five or six different things you could do in HTML and by 1995 I could even do Shockwave. Now I’m more or less crushed by HTML. To do nifty stuff you need to know PHP, MySql, CFM, and/or a wealth of other stuff.
Thus, for my web presence I more or less live with things such as WordPress (but still enjoy tinkering with it). The people that work on blogging tools do such a good job that I don’t find it productive to spend my own time on such things, but playing with Director is still fun 🙂
Note: Several lines of the code in this post had breaks put in them for layout.
June 14th, 2006
For those that develop Shockwave content it is often useful to have an older version of the plug-in kicking around for testing purposes. After doing a bit of digging I managed to find these on the Adobe site.
For those interested, you can drop by this technote.
They only go back to version 6…but that is pretty far back!
June 12th, 2006
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