On Direct-L it was announced that an updated version of the PRegEx Xtra for Director 11 will be release in the next few weeks. Great news!
PRegEx is a free, open source, Xtra that brings the power of Perl regular expressions and list handling to Lingo.
Add comment June 13th, 2008
Do you happen to know of any Director bugs? Be sure to visit The Director Community Bugbase and report them if they aren’t already in the list. Even Adobe is keeping an eye on this list!
For many long-time Director Developers, the time between Director releases can be frustrating. Bugs crop up. Is it you? Is it Director?
The Director Community Bugbase is designed to help you find answers. Having a problem? Search the bugbase to see if sombody’s run across it before. Think you’ve found a bug? Enter it, and save somebody else the frustration you’re having.
The Director Community Bugbase is generously hosted and maintained by Creative Perspectives, Inc. one of the industry’s premier developers of multimedia applications.
Add comment June 12th, 2008
An updated version of Director 11 was released over the weekend for Mac users:
This is a Mac only update that addresses the following issues:
- Referencing a cast member fails when the Cast name has special characters like
!, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), _, +, |, },etc- Shockwave Audio (SWA) files were not streamed properly
- Field component performance is very slow on MAC
For detailed installation instructions and files changed, please see the readme.txt file.
You can download this update on the Director downloads page.
Add comment April 28th, 2008
For the developers out there that like to get a slightly more descriptive error message in their Shockwave-based content you need to have a Shockwave.ini file placed in your shockwave folder. This prior post talked about where you should put it for Shockwave 10 on OSX.
With Shockwave 11 you should navigate to your /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Shockwave 11/ folder. There you will see the DirectorShockwave.bundle. Control-click (right-click) on that bundle and choose “Show contents.” Inside that sits the Plugin.framework folder.
Place the Shockwave.ini in that folder (you will probably have to enter your password at that time) with this text in it.
[Lingo]
DisplayFullLingoErrorText=1
That usually makes debugging just a bit easier 🙂
Note: I haven’t yet looked in to the location for Windows. If anyone knows feel free to comment. I’m sure I’ll need to look for it one of these days.
Add comment April 24th, 2008
I’ll be honest, I still haven’t had time to play with Dir 11. Drudge work lately has been leaving me so tired when I get home that I just want to veg out, run, or drink — while avoiding computers. But while browsing around on Adobe.com and grabbing Lightroom 2.0 beta I noticed new stuff kicking around for Director.
If you want a light read drop by and download the 1245 page Director 11 Scripting Reference. That sure is a lot of lingo.
With that PDF opened I noticed the manual was authored in FrameMaker. I’m still so sad that they ditched the Mac version of that program. Maybe “a tad pissed” is more appropriate than sad. I’ve never gotten over that one…even Steve Jobs was peeved, since all Apple manuals used to be done in FrameMaker. [OK…enough of my side rant.]
To go along with installation problems that were initially reported, Adobe has released a number of technotes related to installation and computer lock up. Far more info on the Director Support Center.
1 comment April 16th, 2008
Here are a few thoughts from week 1 of the brand new Director 11. Most thoughts are from mailing lists (so I guess I can’t really call them mine)…I’ve been so busy this and last week I haven’t had time to think, and I’ve barely had time to play with it.
First, let me just say I’m very happy that Adobe is at least putting one foot forward by getting this running on MacIntel. It really would have been a sign of sure death if they’d gone with the Windows only approach. Director isn’t quite dead yet (as some of us have been saying for 5 to 8 years).
In the few minutes I’ve played with it I’ve found two “quirks.” Not sure that is so good.
The script browser is great, but as soon as I saw it I wanted more functionality. Why can’t I drag a behavior from it on to a sprite in the stage/score? Why is the only option when right/control clicking on a script icon delete? Why can’t I get a nice view of my cast like that where I could create folders and “group” things in to them (or just allow like media to show up in folders like that). This Director is like an iPhone. I see it, love the features, but I want far more.
On the Shockwave side, it took until Thursday evening (four days after release), but Adobe finally changed their redirect page that was preventing MacIntel users from grabbing Shockwave 11. As soon as they changed that our company changed ours as well. It took two years more than it should have, but Shockwave now runs on my gorgeous MacIntel at home.
Beatles are playing in the coffee shop I’m in right now. With the unbelievable amount of Apple/American Idol promotion, combined with two weeks where the Idolites were forced to destroy Beatles songs, you’d think Apple would have used all that to announce Beatles on iTunes. Alas, we’ve been waiting for that longer than Shockwave for MacIntel. [Note: this is not Director related, but hey…popped in to my mind.]
OK…now on to mailing list stuff.
The Xtra Development Kit and Xtra Packaging Kit (XDK/XPK) are available for download here.
A wealth of discussion over this release causing depression among developers. Others are happy that Director is finally moving forward once again. Future versions of Director continue to get mentioned by Allen P.
A very long post by Lutz W. on Direct-L did real world comparisons between Ageia Physics Xtra and the Havok Xtra. Ageia did rather well in some respects, needs work on other parts. It was a great read.
Adobe is trying to get the XDK mailing list reinstated. It died at some point during the Macromedia purchase. If you want to be on this list be sure to drop Allen P. a message.
Looking around for Xtras…these two sites are being updated: Dean’s Xtra Page and Mile High Table ‘o Products. Many updated Xtras were posted by Tabuleiro.
Good Things
MacIntel Director and Shockwave are here!!!!!!
Many from the Adobe Director engineering team are on the mailing lists trying to find out more about bugs.
Lots of Xtras have been updated. Other updates are on the way.
Bad Things
No publicity at all on the front page of the Adobe Site. And SW never seems worthy of a full icon. This still doesn’t seem to represent full blown support from Adobe.
Possible bugs I need to read more about: charPosToLoc, getNetText with unicode.
Text display of anti-aliasing/kerning seems to have a wealth of issues.
The documentation on new features is rather limited at this point. I think I caught a sentence that Adobe is working on getting together lots of sample stuff for a DVD (not positive where I saw that).
Most everything involved in text display/rendering is slow. In the message window if you
put the xtraList
it is very slow, but if you use
put string(the xtraList)
it is vastly faster. Putting strings is always faster in the message window. This issue is now being looked in to by Adobe.
Some Xtras will not be updated. Adobe is actually debating if they want to acquire some and include them with Director.
The GUI associated with the program has become so confusing. The first thing I do is choose the Window > Panel Sets > Director 8 option. A tremendous overhaul is needed.
7 comments March 31st, 2008
OK. Director 11 is here. I found my first bug in about five minutes of playing. Is this a quirk, bug, or “feature?” Guess that is up to interpretation. Anyway…I put a Flash Component Button on the stage. I gave the sprite a name in the Property Inspector window. In a startMovie handler I used:
sprite("aName").label = "Some text"
This used to work in startMovie, but no longer does. It also used to work in a prepareFrame in frame 1 (which occurs before startMovie). This now seems to consistently fail in both Shockwave and Authoring on MacIntel and PPCs.
Bug, feature, or quirk. Hard to say. I guess it might be good to start getting all of these bugs in one place. Suggestions? I think DOUG might have a wiki up, or maybe Dean’s new site, or Director Quirk List…will have to look around when I get a few spare moments. Massive deadline this week…and lots of QA to do with the new Shockwave.
11 comments March 25th, 2008
The links for Shockwave download are now live to Shockwave 11.0.0.0.
Is that enough zeros?
Note: If you are on MacIntel you may have to go to the alternates page due to the redirect issues that MacIntels have had to deal with for the past 2 years.
8 comments March 25th, 2008
Is now available for download. Let the fun begin.
Screenshot of my email message from Adobe talking about my trial download.
11 comments March 24th, 2008
As a reader pointed out, the Shockwave 11 links are now up. Currently they don’t lead to anything though. Looks like something will be out in the wild later tonight. Guess I’ll be doing a lot of testing of online content in the next week.
Currently the link just leads you to a lovely 404 page, “The requested URL /pub/shockwave/default/english/macosx/latest/Shockwave_Installer_Full.dmg was not found on this server.”
Click on image to see Shockwave 11 links
2 comments March 24th, 2008
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