On the Mac, the Windows .dir files will work just fine, EXCEPT:
1) If you copied them over from Windows, and you double-click on them, they will not open up via Director. That does NOT mean that they don't work, but that the Mac doesn't know they are Director files. If you were to run Director on the Mac, and use the File | Open command to open them, you'll see that they work just fine. 2) Mac files won't have .dir extensions (if I recall) unless you expressly give them one. What you are running into here is some differences between the O/Ss. On Windows, file "types" - meaning, how the operating system thinks it should interpret the file - are determined by the extension. A .exe is for an executable, a .bat for a batch file, and so on. When you install Director, it tells Windows that any file that ends in .DIR should be opened by Director.exe On Mac, there is no reliance on extensions. You can give an extension to a file, like .dir, but it doesn't mean a thing to the Mac O/S. The Mac O/S couldn't care less what you named the file. Instead, it keeps with every file, type/creator information. An example might be a type of 'jpeg', with a creator of 'PSHP' (PhotoShop) - and I'm just making these up, so purists don't need to correct me on the "right" creator for PhotoShop. Thus, if you click on ANY file, even if it's called MAIN.DIR, if the type was 'jpeg', then Mac would think it was a jpeg, and if the creator was 'PSHP' then it would try to open it with PhotoShop. Files on Windows don't carry type/creator information, so when you copy files from Windows to Mac, there is no way that the Mac knows what it "ought" to be, so they have a creator of "unknown". Some copy programs might try to be smart and fill in the gaps, but usually they just arrive on the Mac with the type as unknown. So, you can use ResEdit, or some other utility to change the type, or you just have to open up the file explicitly. You do this by running Director directly, then finding the file, opening it up, and perhaps saving it back out again. Saving it out again ought to also write out the correct type/creator info, and then next time you can just click on the file directly. It's not that the file is bad, just that the operating system didn't have enough information to know what to do with the file. The same thing is a problem in reverse. Since the Mac stores type/creator, it doesn't require an extension to sort things out. As a result, you can create files with no extension. Thus, when you move them over to Windows, then Windows doesn't know what to do with them. So, if you want to use your files cross-platform, always save them explicitly with a .dir/.cst extension (or whatever). And on the Mac, when you want to open a file originally written under Windows, run Director and open up the file explicitly. As far as Unix, there is no runtime engine / shockwave player for Unix that's publicly available, so you'd have to find some other presentation method that was available for Unix. If Flash will do it for you, then that's an alternative. - Tab At 09:16 AM 6/25/02 +0530, Anand Ravi wrote: >Hi! > >I have developed a projector CD using Director 8.5 for Windows. My client >now wants to run this on Mac platform also. When I tried to copy the .dir >files, they did not work. On the mac platform, I found that the director >files I created did not have the .dir extension. This is my first experience >with the Mac platform. Any help will be greatly appreciated. > >Another outside question. If my client also wants the CD to work in the Unix >platform, I think I need to migrate to Flash. Am I correct here. > >Thanks and Regards, >Anand Ravi [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
