Last week, Thomas Higgins posted a note about Quicktime 7 preview for Windows breaking support for Quicktime video in Shockwave. The artcle reads:
At this time we believe that we've identified the underlying cause of this issue as a bug in the QuickTime Player code itself but are working with Apple in order to confirm that fact and to see what type of fix will be required (...)
It's a shame to see director3d.de go down. Guess there must be more to that story than meet the obvious eye... Good luck Christophe, I wish you'ld stay.
With Shockwave 10.1 released a couple of weeks ago, there's a whole lot of new and updated stuff. Not all of this stuff is well documented though (even if it is listed in the releasenotes).
For example, would you know what exactly changed when reading this?
174047 using importFileInto to import a 32 bit image, it is remapped to the stage depth, removing alpha-information on 16 bit desktops
Before 10.1, importFileInto would always remap the imported image to the current screen depth. This often makes sense, as it is cheaper to do the conversion once than to have to do it each time the image member is used. However, it also meant that the alpha-channel in 32 bit images would get thrown away if the system was running in 16 bit or lower color setting; no nice 8 bit transparencies in PNGs or TIFs, or even 1 bit transparencies in GIFs.
Shockwave as a player has a new product manager which can only be a good thing. Earlier this week she announced the preview of a new Shockwave player, and she's keeping herself busy:
Macromedia, in the person of Emmy Huang is inviting the director community to create Shockwave content about the US Presidential election.
While I think its a good idea to stimulate the creation of content related to current high attention events, the US Presidential election may be a poor choice: Every effort will be compared to (and look miserable in comparison with) the hugely popular JibJab rendition of This Land is my Land...
Thomas Higgins points us Director fanboys to an article by the Flash Player Product Manager about changes in XP SP2. Having had SP2 (the RC's) installed on my TabletPC for some time, most of what Waleed Anbar says isn't new. In his article, he mentions the Local Machine Zone Lockdown. Basically what this means is that you get an extra two (!) warnings if you use ActiveX content in local files, such as publish preview pages from Flash and Director, and pages from browser based CD-Roms.
After the experience of installing Shockwave with my mother I concluded: "the lesson to learn is that - at least for my mother - the problem in installing the Shockwave plugin was in the combination of a long download and the number of dialogs". Anything that made her wait or choose made her doubt if she was doing a good thing.
The new Shockwave installer is about half the size of the previous versions, and has two less dialogs. Macromedia is listening!
I just got off the phone with my mother. She's been getting computer lessons from my sister Wopke. My mother used to do some computer work for my father's practice, but this "Windows" thing is totally new for her. Webbrowsing, emailing and MSN, she's learning it all (one step at a time). Anyway. she called me.
Apparently, my mother wanted to show my aunt Riet the panoramic photography I do. Riet is a "real", analog photographer, or at least I have always regarded her to be one.
"I'm on your site. Can I see the photos any bigger?" - "Sure, you just click on the small thumbnail image I and the browser will show an image you can look around in." "Yes, we did that, but all we got was this big bar that filled up really slowly. It also said something with Shockwave."
