04 2004-02-12 - By Thomas Higgins
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All,
> Hmm...is there no 'what's new for old director users' documents?
There's a feature overview page:
<http://www.macromedia.com/software/director/productinfo/features/>
And on the way is a tech note that will outline the legacy bugs fixed this
release (XML parser memory leaks, use of (or not) embedded fonts on user
restricted systems, etc.).
Also on the way are some DevNet articles that will give more depth to some
of the new features (yours truly was just asked to do an article on MIAW
changes this release, Mark Jonkman has already written some great JS syntax
stuff, other articles have also been authored too).
These are all ways of addressing this need, do they suffice or were you
wanting something else?
> I'm not so sure the new JS stuff speeds things up (except for
> loops) -- and the new _player _movie stuff is a bit weird...
JS syntax was not introduced to speed things up, it was intended as a
feature that would expose a whole new realm of people to Director that
previously may have been hesitant due to not knowing or wanting to learn
Lingo. Yes, this is just a syntax on top of our object and event model,
therefore that JavaScripter will need to learn about the score, sprites,
members, etc., as well as exitFrame, startMovie and the like, but at least
the syntax will be familiar. So look at this as a way of opening the app to
a _huge_ range of new users (Flash scripters and JS scripters), new users
mean higher sales which translates into more Director for all of us. :)
But wait, the implementation of JS support doesn't just benefit others,
there are benefits for Lingo folks as well. For starters we've cleaned up
the object model, so while _player and _movie might seem weird at first,
it's just completing the object model that's always been there and making
sure it's exposed properly. The JS engine would simply not have been able to
handle things like "the desktopRectList", therefore we decided to properly
expose the system object (_system) and let you access the property off the
object using _system.desktopRectList. So general object model clean-up was a
fallout of the JS support implementation that will benefit everyone. Not
sure yet why this is good? Try this on for size:
window("foo").movie.castLib[2].member["UserName"].text = "..."
Or:
window("foo").movie.callSomeHandler()
Because we exposed _movie (referring to the currently active movie object)
we could also expose the movie objects playing in MIAW's. Aaaaaaaand, we can
nown expose the movie object playing as a LDM:
sprite(2).movie.member["foo"].image
So don't look at the top surface of the JS feature and the object model
clean-up for evaluation, let it set in, look at all of what it allows, then
in the back of your head remind yourself: You can still code using your old
Lingo all day long and MX 2004 won't care! :) We want people to migrate to
the new cleaned-up syntax (JS scripters will have to), but Lingo folks have
the chance to migrate progressively and not in one big jump.
> Plus it seems that the dvd stuff, especially paths, are strange...
> <snip>
Yes, there are some glitches in path naming usage with DVD (on the Mac for
example, you must provide and it will always return paths using Unix-style
"/" path delimiters. This is a bug that's going to get a tech note and
(hopefully) a bug fix.
Cheers,
Tom Higgins
Product Specialist - Director Team
Macromedia
Announcing Director MX 2004, de lekkerste!
http://www.macromedia.com/software/director
...
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