What the HECK were they thinking??

[theo]

I don't care what anyone says about Flash and Director integration- IT
SUCKS!!!! Why in the heck are two supposed authoring and animation programs
so dang hard to implement together ESPECIALLY since they are developed by
the SAME company. I mean for crying out loud I am not a geek who has been
coding Lingo for eighty years. And even the Lingo geeks have a bit of a time
with Actionscript/Lingo integration. And there are probably, like, two of
THEM on the planet who have it completely figured out.

I am pulling my hair out people. There has to be a better way to make money
than this. I am becoming more and more convinced that my mulitmedia
solutions are going to be implemented with strictly one or the other!! I
mean what's the deal with two totally different languages?
Why not just use one for both Flash AND Director??!! I don't care if it is
Lingo or Actionscript! This would make the whole miserable process much more
simple for everybody. And they shouold have thought of this like five years
ago.

What did they have going on behind closed doors at Macromedia? Buncha
pale-faced, over-weight, dipstick pencil-heads on two sides of line drawn on
the carpet with a bet that one language will outlive the other or what?

If I sound sick and tired I am!!! I am working on moving a very long and
laborious Flash presentation into Director because the graphics were a bit
overwhelming for Flash's nice little engine. But if I knew what I was
getting into I would have rather went to China and had the tiny Pinkos read
the Communist Manifesto to me everyday for twenty years.

[Andrew Morton]

Google for "all software sucks" e.g.
[url]http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/archives/0303/techwhirl-0303-00134.html[/url]

Andrew Morton

[theo]

Andrew I take that veiled reply as an affirmative, if so, thank you in
advance for the understanding.......If it wasn't an affirmative, but a
thinly veiled whack up the side of my head then you can jump off the nearest
park bench with all due respect. At this point I don't care if I was talking
to the God of all binary sculpture, I just want things to work. And hey fine
people I am not knocking about Macromedia or the Flash and Director
platform.......... I JUST HATE THE INTEGRATION ISSUES!!!

[Doug Golenski]

Theo,
If you are only venting frustration, then disregard the rest of this post.
If you are looking for answers to some of the questions in your post then
read on...or if you need specific help then post the details of the problems
you are having and see what help comes along (you may be surprised).

Flash and Director are two tools aimed at two very different market
segments. Director (which is by far the oldest of the two programs) was
originally created to give developers a rapid multimedia development tool
for delivering multimedia applications via disk and CD. Lingo was
originally conceived as an easy to learn programming language based on using
plain english. As more programmers began using Director the Lingo language
was forced to evolve into a more robust language, adding new terms and
appropriating some standard programming terminology. Then came the internet
boom. So Macromedia started to cobble on internet features to Director.
Somewhere along the line MM realized that no matter how much they added to
Director the internet's bandwidth limitations (at the time) would never
support the type of full featured multimedia that was Director's forte. So
MM went out and bought futureSplash. futureSplash was a nifty vector
animation tool for internet delivery. Like Director, futureSplash evolved
as developers wanted more features and futureSplash became Flash. With the
change in name also came a new programming language; actionScript.
ActionScript was developed to work within the framework of a web browser, so
it was and is limited in some ways.

So in order to take a product that was made to work within a web browser and
integrate it with a program that works directly with an operating system
(both of which have evolved in different directions)is a pretty large task.
I think that is the point of Andrew's post, not to defend MM necessarily,
but to point out that every piece of software has its "challenges" and we as
developers have to constantly learn how to live with it. As for the
problems you are having, if you could be more specific someone could
probably help you resolve any issues you are having. It's been my
experience that there are definitly more than two on the planet who know
enough to help. I actually wonder if there is even ONE person who has
TOTALLY figured out all of the actionScript/Lingo interaction issues...but
as I stated there are many who have figured out enough of it to help with
most problems.
"theo" <jonreb@bright.net> wrote in message
news:bj67h8$ept$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> I don't care what anyone says about Flash and Director integration- IT
> SUCKS!!!! Why in the heck are two supposed authoring and animation

programs

> so dang hard to implement together ESPECIALLY since they are developed by
> the SAME company. I mean for crying out loud I am not a geek who has been
> coding Lingo for eighty years. And even the Lingo geeks have a bit of a

time

> with Actionscript/Lingo integration. And there are probably, like, two of
> THEM on the planet who have it completely figured out.
>
> I am pulling my hair out people. There has to be a better way to make

money

> than this. I am becoming more and more convinced that my mulitmedia
> solutions are going to be implemented with strictly one or the other!! I
> mean what's the deal with two totally different languages?
> Why not just use one for both Flash AND Director??!! I don't care if it is
> Lingo or Actionscript! This would make the whole miserable process much

more

> simple for everybody. And they shouold have thought of this like five

years

> ago.
>
> What did they have going on behind closed doors at Macromedia? Buncha
> pale-faced, over-weight, dipstick pencil-heads on two sides of line drawn

on

> the carpet with a bet that one language will outlive the other or what?
>
> If I sound sick and tired I am!!! I am working on moving a very long and
> laborious Flash presentation into Director because the graphics were a bit
> overwhelming for Flash's nice little engine. But if I knew what I was
> getting into I would have rather went to China and had the tiny Pinkos

read

> the Communist Manifesto to me everyday for twenty years.
>
>

[Stephen Whipp]

I think the reason for the 2 different languages, is that flash was
developed initially by another company. I admit it is frustrataing to have
to learn 2 languages, especially when they bare absolutely no relationship
to each other, I personally would favour action script syntax, but thats
only because the code requires less typing and I'm a C programmer at heart.
However some of lingos features(especially list and string handling) are far
superior. Also the scripting languages reflect the differenes in underlying
architecture, which are quite profound in many ways. It would be nice
however if lingo could have a 3rd syntax added which was more in line with
Actionscript, given that this is one of the more popular syntax's.

On the integration issue I think the problems are all due to the differences
in underlying architecture, I've not done much in the way of integration
between the 2, but I was annoyed to find that it took me and a flash expert
about 3 hours just to manage to pass a single value into a flash program.
Out of . This was probably due to poor documentation and examples of their
use. There seems to be a plephora of information on controlling director
from flash, but very little about controlling flash from director, apart
from through the standard commands of the flash asset. At least MX allows
you to integrate with the new function format of Flash MX though .

interest is there a way of calling flash functions directly from Director or
is setVariable the only way to easilly interface with it.

Anyway better get back to work I suppose

--
Stephen Whipp
Eastmond Publishing Ltd. (UK)
-----------------------------------------------
Visit our website at:
[url]www.autograph-maths.com[/url]
----------------------------------------------

theo <jonreb@bright.net> wrote in message
news:bj67h8$ept$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> I don't care what anyone says about Flash and Director integration- IT
> SUCKS!!!! Why in the heck are two supposed authoring and animation

programs

> so dang hard to implement together ESPECIALLY since they are developed by
> the SAME company. I mean for crying out loud I am not a geek who has been
> coding Lingo for eighty years. And even the Lingo geeks have a bit of a

time

> with Actionscript/Lingo integration. And there are probably, like, two of
> THEM on the planet who have it completely figured out.
>
> I am pulling my hair out people. There has to be a better way to make

money

> than this. I am becoming more and more convinced that my mulitmedia
> solutions are going to be implemented with strictly one or the other!! I
> mean what's the deal with two totally different languages?
> Why not just use one for both Flash AND Director??!! I don't care if it is
> Lingo or Actionscript! This would make the whole miserable process much

more

> simple for everybody. And they shouold have thought of this like five

years

> ago.
>
> What did they have going on behind closed doors at Macromedia? Buncha
> pale-faced, over-weight, dipstick pencil-heads on two sides of line drawn

on

> the carpet with a bet that one language will outlive the other or what?
>
> If I sound sick and tired I am!!! I am working on moving a very long and
> laborious Flash presentation into Director because the graphics were a bit
> overwhelming for Flash's nice little engine. But if I knew what I was
> getting into I would have rather went to China and had the tiny Pinkos

read

> the Communist Manifesto to me everyday for twenty years.
>
>

[John Dowdell]

theo wrote:

> I am working on moving a very long and laborious Flash
> presentation into Director because the graphics were a bit
> overwhelming for Flash's nice little engine.

Hmm. If your presentation is still in SWF (as I'd assume from your other
comments on integrating the tools), then these SWFs would still be
rendered by the Macromedia Flash Player, in its Xtra wrapper inside
Director instead of its ActiveX wrapper inside IE/Win or its Netscape
Plugin wrapper inside of other browsers.

(iow, I wouldn't expect any change, at least from what we out here can
read from the details scattered within the rant.)

jd




--
John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA
Search technotes: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/[/url]
Soapbox column: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/jd_forum/[/url]
Daily technical diary: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd[/url]
Offlist mail is trapped by spam-filters... best here, thanks!

[Stephen Whipp]

Does it use flashes engine???????????? from what I've seen it uses directors
vector engine to display the flash stuff, A resized flash sprite suffers
from the same Antialiasing problems (erm... smudges) that Directors native
vector shapes suffer from. This problem is not observed if you resize the
same flash movie in its own player.

Sorry people, I tend to rant about this problem with director, but then its
been the bane of my life in dynamic graph drawing for the last 6 months or
so.



John Dowdell <supportinfo@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:bj8ird$f2m$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> theo wrote:

> > I am working on moving a very long and laborious Flash
> > presentation into Director because the graphics were a bit
> > overwhelming for Flash's nice little engine.

>
> Hmm. If your presentation is still in SWF (as I'd assume from your other
> comments on integrating the tools), then these SWFs would still be
> rendered by the Macromedia Flash Player, in its Xtra wrapper inside
> Director instead of its ActiveX wrapper inside IE/Win or its Netscape
> Plugin wrapper inside of other browsers.
>
> (iow, I wouldn't expect any change, at least from what we out here can
> read from the details scattered within the rant.)
>
> jd
>
>
>
>
> --
> John Dowdell, Macromedia Developer Support, San Francisco CA
> Search technotes: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/[/url]
> Soapbox column: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/desdev/jd_forum/[/url]
> Daily technical diary: [url]http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd[/url]
> Offlist mail is trapped by spam-filters... best here, thanks!
>