andrewlucking.com

Wow, is wikipedia.org fast. I was grabbing a link to the wikipedia page on Pierre Berton, whose death was announced only a few hours ago, and noticed that it had already been updated to mention his passing.

peace.

Pierre Berton died today. I’ve read a few of his books and thought they were great - Klondike is a favourite. It was after reading My Times, one of his autobiographies, that I really developed a respect for the man and his values.

Just a few weeks ago I caught an episode of This Hour has 22 Minutes Monday Report on which he appeared. I think he did a sketch in which he shared his secrets for rolling a good joint. Hilarious.

peace.

The javascript object watch command now works on packaged pieces. You’ll need to package the piece with the KO that the command adds to the top of the flowline, then launch the command outside of Authorware and you’ll be able to view the js objects in your packaged piece.

Ron Lubensky has it for download over here:
http://www.clickcraft.com/aware

Here’s Ron’s earlier description of the command:

You launch the Command on your application, it pastes a KO icon into the top of it to do the work of watching your JavaScript objects. Then it resigns itself to be its non-modal interface window. So when you run your application, use the window to view the current values of your JavaScript objects, their properties and methods.

See the read-me calc as well as the help button on the command for more specific details.

peace.

Yankee Doodle went to town
Arriving on a Sunday
Found some peple living there
Killed them all by Monday

If you’re looking for a film that will start a conversation consider taking a look at
Control Room. Primarily a documentary about Al-Jazeera and it’s coverage of the war in Iraq, this film takes a hard-nosed look at the media in war.

Here’s another quote:

Truth ultimately finds its way to people’s eyes and ears and hearts.
- Donald Rumsfeld

I love seeing Authorware content come up in the aggregator.

Joe Ganci has written a DevNet article on the PowerPoint converter in Authorware 7. He does a great job of covering why you’d want to use this tool. Its nice to see him addressing expectations as well:

PowerPoint and Authorware are two very different products with different aims. It should come as no surprise that PowerPoint files sometimes cannot convert completely without losing something in the conversion, much like translating Chinese to English will result in a loss of nuance and words that don’t quite match perfectly between the languages.

peace.

From this thread on the aware list.

There is a bug in Authorware 7 where accessing the values of aws user variables in javascript (through the aw object) can return incorrect values. This only occurs in the destination file of a JumpFile() or JumpFileReturn(). According to Jamil, this is due to the fact that internal to Authorware the lookups for custom variables are referenced by index. The work around is to use Eval().

JZ also mentioned that this will be fixed in the next release (7.03, 7.5, 8.0 ??)…

peace.

Adding the scrollbars option to long flowlines was a nice addition back in Authorware 5.0(?). The next logical step would be to have them respond to a mouse scroll… Same goes for libraries.

peace.

Wow, that was easy. I had installed 1.0 when it was released last week but rolled it back to the PR (preview release) when I found some of the extensions I consider essential were not yet updated. I took the 5 minutes to do it again this morning and we are back in business. Wish I could write software that was as pleasant.

peace.

There are occasions when I honestly believe Authorware could be better served by not being owned by Macromedia. Pretty bold statement, huh? After all Macromedia took a fledgling FutureSplash and turned it into the leading web application/animation platform going. By far. How could Authorware possibly be in better hands?

For any company to invest in a product it obviously has to offer them a return. The issue for Macromedia is to find a way to invest in Authorware so that it attracts new users (and their money) without simply competing with, and drawing developers away from, their other products. These decisions could be alot easier for an organization that was competing with packages like Flash and Director for marketshare.

That said, you’ll notice I wrote Authorware could be better served. Simply applying some of the things that make Macromedia such a success would serve Authorware the best. MM is such a dynamic company, attracting some brilliant developers and designers. They are so adept at “determining” the needs and requirements of their users and then fulfilling those needs. Perhaps that is why some aw developers get so passionate about what they see as “neglect”. They see the potential and it frustrates them that it doesn’t appear to be leveraged.