http://flex.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Director Copyright 2008 FLEX DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Mon, 12 May 2008 05:44:00 GMT FLEX DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://flex.sys-con.com/read/200348.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/200348.htm Mon, 03 Apr 2006 11:00:00 GMT The Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM ®) Shareable Content Object (SCO) Presentation Engine (S2PE) is a SCORM content presentation application prototype, which allows content to be abstracted from the playback mechanism. The engine removes the burden of programming Learning Management System (LMS) communication from the content author by automatically handling all communication for them. Rather th an programming content, the author describes content through Extensible Markup Language (XML) files, which the engine interprets to render the content. The engine is robust in its support for graphics, text, video, audio, 3D, Shockwave, and Flash content. The engine also supports quizzes, interactivity, and synchronization of events. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/180301.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/180301.htm Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:00:00 GMT During the course of reading this article and carrying out the various exercises, you and your 3D artist colleagues will get a practical, hands-on idea of the workflow required to create and export Shockwave 3D content using any of the major 3D applications. You will create a 3D environment, export it as Shockwave 3D, and drive around it in a virtual vehicle using the keyboard's arrow keys. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/48960.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/48960.htm Tue, 01 Nov 2005 09:00:00 GMT We live in a communications world. The number of software solutions that can provide communication between users grows every day. In the future it's likely that applications unable to provide this ability will be known as 'traditional applications,' shunned because of their lack of openness and communication ability. A simple example of this can be seen in the game industry. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/121572.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/121572.htm Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:00:00 GMT Director has three things going for it that are unique in both the Macromedia and Adobe product lines: Imaging Lingo (or JavaScript), Shockwave 3D, and DVD support http://flex.sys-con.com/read/117854.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/117854.htm Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:00:00 GMT No matter how powerful a computer you or your end user has, faster software is always desirable. For one, we live in an era where time is very valuable and technology is here to empower us, not to set limits on what we can or wish to do. Furthermore, the responsiveness of an application to its user is a crucial benefit and increasingly important differentiator between ordinary software and superior software. Responsiveness of software is generally defined as its ability to react fast, to provide guidance and feedback and to allow users to cancel or redirect time-consuming operations. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/100864.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/100864.htm Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:00:00 GMT Now that Captivate has been on the street for a few months and I have been out there 'yacking it up,' the product has moved from novelty to production tool in rather short order. Once that happens, there are the subsequent, 'How do I...?' questions that inevitably crop up. This article deals with a five of the more common ones that I have encountered and shows you how to deal with them. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/86112.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/86112.htm Wed, 18 May 2005 10:00:00 GMT Recently in a Shockwave3D project, I had some problems with the modelsUnderRay command. More precisely, modelsUnderRay seemed to have some problems of its own. Occasionally it just didn't give the correct result, it would miss a model somehow. In the particular application I was building (a landscape that let the user's drive a car around on the surface), this was dramatic because the when modelsUnderRay failed, the car fell through the world. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/47857.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/47857.htm Fri, 21 Jan 2005 00:00:00 GMT Recently, I have been working in Shockwave3D in Lingo and JavaScript syntax. Regardless of what I am writing, I keep running into issues that can be summed up by the following phrase: I don't know exactly what I'm doing. More precisely, I don't know exactly what I am doing when I am doing it. I'm figuring it out. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/47585.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/47585.htm Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT Hello! I wanted to wait and formally greet you from the Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. Some of you might know me from my writing at Director-Online, or from the Macromedia DevNet Center. Others are probably reading this and saying to themselves 'Hey... wait a minute... where's James...' http://flex.sys-con.com/read/47587.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/47587.htm Tue, 21 Dec 2004 00:00:00 GMT Shockwave3D (S3D), despite a number of advantages such as delivery on the Web and small plug-in size, suffers from a few disadvantages in terms of its architecture. One of the 'classic problems' with regard to the way S3D is built is the inability of the developer to manipulate exactly when objects are drawn to the screen, or more correctly the order in which they are drawn to the screen. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/47128.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/47128.htm Thu, 18 Nov 2004 00:00:00 GMT 'Hi, my name is Kerry, and I'm a programmer.' I looked around the room as people murmured 'Hello Kerry.' Most of them were what you would expect - some shaggy long hairs, a couple of women with buzz cuts, a pony tail here and there, some middle-aged guys with even less hair than I have. A lot of the people were generic American white, but there was a Chinese couple, a clean-cut man with a yarmulke, a couple of guys who looked Indian, and one lone, sad-looking black woman. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/46766.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/46766.htm Mon, 18 Oct 2004 00:00:00 GMT One of the primary strengths of Macromedia Director is the various media types it can combine in any application. Director can utilize most any standard graphic format, audio format, and almost every popular video technology on the market. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/46269.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/46269.htm Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT The 'HUGO BOSS, HUGO Academy: CD-ROM Fall/Winter 2003' CD-ROM won the coveted Grand Award for Best Application at the New York Festivals 2003 competition. The Frankfurt-based agency Biedermann und Brandstift designed a training CD-ROM for HUGO shop employees whose main content was created in Flash. The application's skeleton was developed by bytes in motion using Director MX. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/46273.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/46273.htm Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT So here's the deal: you want to create a snowboarding game. You have three weeks to do it, it can't exceed 1MB, and it must work online on at least 80% of kids' PCs. So let's list the options open to us. That's going to be one short list: boot up your copy of Director MX 2004 and get started! Before we get our boots on and set off for a great half-pipe session on our favorite board, we're going to need some assets. Here at Catalyst, we use Lightwave 3D for 3D asset creation. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/46274.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/46274.htm Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and the Information Technology Department where I teach, has long been a user of Macromedia products, from Dreamweaver to Director and most things in between. Recently, there has been some debate as to the future of Director's role, considering the increasing use of Flash in the marketplace for Web graphics and interactive displays. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/46275.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/46275.htm Wed, 08 Sep 2004 00:00:00 GMT Thanks to the extensive range of xtras available, a Director projector can create any type of document and write it to the user's hard disk. In Windows Explorer and the Macintosh Finder, users expect that a double-click on a document icon will launch the program that created it. This article shows you how to associate files with the Director projector that created them. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45946.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45946.htm Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT Windows, Macintosh, and Unix have three different ways of referring to a line break. Windows uses two separate characters - Carriage Return followed by Line Feed - while Macintosh uses just Carriage Return and Unix uses just Line Feed. To complicate matters, the fonts generally available on the platforms are different, and accented characters are also coded differently. While Director does its best to help you cope with all of this diversity, there are times when you need to take matters into your own hands. This article will show you how. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45947.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45947.htm Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT Yes it's true - at some point, it was a challenge for me to swap an image on the stage. Hey, we all start somewhere. About a million challenges later, and voilà - a decent Director developer! http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45948.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45948.htm Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT Most of my work is invisible. At least, it isn't seen by very many people. Much of it is business-to-business sales tools for high-end server components. Lately, a good portion of it has been in languages where the target audience is even smaller than the English-speaking market. The majority of the projects on which I work have a maximum audience of a few thousand people worldwide. The concept demos and analysis tools that have been my bread (except for the Atkins diet) and butter over the past few years may only be seen by less than a couple hundred people. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45949.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45949.htm Wed, 11 Aug 2004 00:00:00 GMT 'Yo, guru!' I looked up to see the guy a couple cubicles over prairie-dogging, trying to get my attention. I think they call me 'guru' because I'm too old to be called 'dude,' not from the feeling of awe I think I am due. 'What's the ASCII code for the German u-umlaut?' I was tempted to say 'none,' which would have been, technically, the correct answer. Instead, I opted to be nice for once, and told him 'Lower case? 252, decimal.' http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45623.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45623.htm Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT Macromedia Director is best known for building games, 3D simulations, and animations. What a lot of developers probably don't realize is that Director can also be used to build elaborate applications, and even more so now with the release of Director MX 2004, which supports ECMAScript-compliant JavaScript syntax. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45624.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45624.htm Tue, 20 Jul 2004 00:00:00 GMT Kiosk systems provide a unique set of development conditions and challenges. Whereas most multimedia development produces a software application, a kiosk is a collection of physical, hardware, software, and support systems. This article attempts to look at the entire kiosk project, in hopes that you will have control over most of it. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/45294.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/45294.htm Thu, 17 Jun 2004 00:00:00 GMT In many programs, if you keep the mouse over an area of the screen (for example, a button) for a short amount of time, a small text message pops up to describe what the area of the interface does. This is knows as a 'tooltip.' Tooltips have become a widely accepted way of making user interfaces clearer. The new user can use them to learn basic functionality. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/44909.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/44909.htm Wed, 19 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT In this last article (for now) of a series of articles on Xtra development using Macromedia's Open Architecture, or MOA, I thought it'd be nice to take a quick tour through some of the little quirks, clues, shortcuts, and hints I've accumulated over the years. These are in no specific order other than that I've tried to keep related items together. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/44910.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/44910.htm Wed, 19 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT Tabs are a basic interface element that Director has tended to ignore. Director MX 2004 introduces a series of new FlashComponent member types, to renew and extend the built-in controls, but there is no tab member to be found among them. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/44911.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/44911.htm Wed, 19 May 2004 00:00:00 GMT Apparently since the dawn of time, Director has had quite an affinity for the processor and its cycles. In fact, Director appears to like the processor so much that when running, there is little to no free processor time. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/44424.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/44424.htm Wed, 07 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT From the people that brought you the V12 Database Engine and PDF Xtra comes Impressario: an Xtra for the manipulation of PDF documents. OK, so it's true that PDF Xtra already provides navigation and zooming features to Director, but Impressario is PDF Xtra Pro. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/44425.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/44425.htm Wed, 07 Apr 2004 00:00:00 GMT If I promised to take you to see a foreign city, one where you were not fluent in the language, and didn't know your way around, and then actually flew you there to visit, would you wnat me to just drop you off in the center of town and leave you there? http://flex.sys-con.com/read/43892.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/43892.htm Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT For more than a decade, Director has set the standard for multimedia development. In fact, Director was the first multimedia authoring tool to combine animation with a scripting language so that developers could create interactive presentations, games, or computer-based training courses. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/43902.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/43902.htm Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT In my last article (MXDJ, Vol. 2, issue 2), we looked at how Macromedia Director is extensible, primarily through Xtras (plug-ins); and that there are four major types of Xtras - Scripting/Lingo Xtras, Sprite Xtras, Transition Xtras, and Tool Xtras. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/43903.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/43903.htm Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:00:00 GMT One of the great things about working with Director is that there are so many tools and functionalities, but only when you start combining these do you start to realize the real power of Director. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/43535.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/43535.htm Mon, 02 Feb 2004 00:00:00 GMT Macromedia Director has proven itself in myriad applications as the development platform of choice. Although Director lets nonprogrammers create multimedia applications, there are a surprising number of developers with traditional software engineering backgrounds who use Director. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/38610.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/38610.htm Mon, 05 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT Panic seems to be a common feeling for those new to Director, those who dare to launch it. We're going to try to ease the feeling of panic and create familiarity with common interface elements. You should also feel inspired to use Director for projects where you may be using Flash for comfort's sake. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/38611.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/38611.htm Mon, 05 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT I have been using Director for many years now, for a wide variety of projects from Web games to kiosks, and it's a really great platform for developing complex projects quickly. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/38612.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/38612.htm Mon, 05 Jan 2004 00:00:00 GMT Application users change their minds and make mistakes. The undo item in the Edit menu has been a standard feature in all applications since the dawn of menu-driven applications. undo buttons in toolbars are more recent. http://flex.sys-con.com/read/37927.htmhttp://flex.sys-con.com/read/37927.htm Mon, 17 Nov 2003 00:00:00 GMT Director is a great application for new media promotion and promotions together can create an audience for a project and assist with beginning stages of the design process. Stickmancan is a prerelease for a project called 'stickmancan '. It is structured as an interactive screensaver that also acts as a countdown to the launch of the product.