Posts filed under 'Quick answer'
As a developer you’ll end up needing an older version of a plugin every now and then just so you can be sure something will work for those of us that don’t live on the cutting edge (despite common sense I often install lots of things that have beta in the title…like Soundbooth, Lightroom, etc.).
Adobe has several versions of both the Shockwave and Flash plugins available on their site:
Shockwave Plugin (back to version 7).
Flash Plugin (back to version 2).
November 16th, 2006
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 
September 1st, 2006
I have barely touched the game world, but one common thing that shows up in many games is a bar that ticks down your last moments of time. A question for a countdown timer is often brought up in forums, and there are many examples of timers kicking around everywhere from the built in behaviors to other samples on the web.
Here is a really quick one that just reduces the size of a QD (quick draw) rectangle. It used the _system.milliseconds for checking time on the exitFrame of a behavior applied to the QD rect sprite.
Source code for countdown time
February 22nd, 2006
When people first begin learning Lingo it is very common to do things such as sprite(21).visible = 0 or member(155).color = color(200,0,0). However, it is always advantageous to create behaviors that don’t make use of “hard coded” numbers so that the behavior can be reused in the future without having to adjust the sprite or member numbers or names.
When I first started playing with Lingo my code was full of these hard coded things. Now when I look back at stuff from a decade ago it kills me. Of course, when under pressure I’ll slip in a few of those things at the very end of a project. I always wish I could avoid it, but time pressures often cause the brain to ignore reason.
On the Adobe Director Forum a question was raised about changing the color of text on a mouseEnter event without having to recode each behavior for different member numbers. A very simple way to do this is to write a behavior that allows you to choose the color you want as you drop the behavior on each text member that you apply the behavior to.
Sample file: text_color_rollover.zip
Once you have written a good behavior, you end up using it for many years and many projects.
February 17th, 2006
A question was brought up in the Macromedia forums related to menus with submenus, and how would one could make one that functioned similar to the ones at the top of the forums.
I would like to create a sub-navigation that looks something like this:
Nav1 | Nav2 | Nav3
sub1 | sub2 | sub3
Is it possible to hide the sub-navigation until one of the main navigation(Nav2) links is rolled over? Can I have it stay there until another main navigation link is hit or when the user is taken to another frame?
There are a lot of ways to create menus, ranging from using Flash, imaging lingo, and dynamically generated sprites. In the forum JB basically answered the question with the very basic approach that allows for very quick development of this sort of thing with just a few lines of code.
You can download a sample file that was done in DirMX 2004.
Source for menu_demo.dir
There is also an article on Director Online related to menus, and using One Sprite Widgets at LingoWorkshop can make complex menus.
February 15th, 2006
