More progress, Geek talk about my project

Yep, did a little work on the layout of the site so it’s looking a little bit better. A bit more tweaking to do, plus I haven’t checked it in IE on windows so I’m not certain it’s all sitting the way it should, I’ll get round to checking it soon.

So, what else? making good progress on the Flash/Director project I’m working on, hopefully get that all finished on Thursday and get it sent to the client for final approval, it’s been a tough job with quite a few challenges. It’s one thing to get up to speed on new software but it’s another thing to deal with unexpected bugs / glitches, it’s been one issue after another on this job.

I said I’d talk about this project so I might as well start, the project is a piece of software that is used to choose and assemble individual PDF pages and assemble them into books. The framework for the software is made up of Director MX 2004 and uses a Flash MX 2004 movie as the main interface aspect. It also uses Tabuleiro’s Arca database Xtra and Integration New Media’s Impressario Xtra for PDF processing.

One of the biggest issues I faced (right near the end of the project!) was a weird issue with a Flash movie with several MM listbox components running inside the Director projector running on Win XP. I had no problems in any other OS, Win 98 / 2000, Mac OSX/OS9. The application would freeze when clicking on a listbox item, I figured out that it only happened on machines with slower processors running XP which is why I hadn’t spotted it as my main test PC was obviously able to cope.

There was no solution other than to change the listboxes, so I bought a set of Ghostwire Studios components and they fixed the problem. The only drawback was that it meant I had to recode a fair bit as they don’t share the exact same API as the Macromedia components set, however, they’re more lightweight and don’t cause the problem!

It’s been good working with Director again, I haven’t used it much for years so it was interesting getting into it again. It was weird working with Flash inside of it as it meant using a mixture of Flash Actionscript and Director’s Lingo syntax, plus Director lets you use Javascript syntax too now so there’s so many ways to do things, it get’s kind of confusing though!

Well, I’m going to leave it there, time to go and sleep! Oh yeah, I did say this was a place for me to geek out!

~Rick