At 14:37 06.01.2003 -0600, you wrote:
Of course this very much depends on the type of project you'll be going to do.Hello,I have a large CD-ROM project to do and I'm trying to convince my colleges to produce the CD-ROM in Director. They are flash people so they of course want to produce the CD in flash. Can anyone give me some good reasons (AMMO) to bring to my next meeting so that we can produce this project in director? What are common pitfalls of doing the project in flash? What are common pitfalls of doing the project in director?
This may be a rant, but then again, I saw all of this happen. I may be wrong/not up to date about flash's capabilities.
Flash appears to be somewhat retarded when it comes to interaction with external programs (or even files). Actionscript has that fscommand() function but it won't allow to pass a parameter to an external program called that way.
(At least this was the case in fl5, didn't check with fl6)
So, in case the CD is of the presentation type, i.e. a menu to start a bunch of .pdf, .doc, .ppt files and you want to make sure that a certain viewer.exe is used if the user happens to not have the program needed installed, you'd end up creating a plethora of dedicated starter.exe 's in C or VB (instead of a single one taking the file to display as an parameter) which more or less hardcode the parameter flash won't pass over.
FileIO. Such simple things like reading an .ini, writing a log in some sort of standard format. You can abuse flash's xml to read a plain ansi .txt but to write an install.log to a specific system dir like %AppData% or %Personal%? Create a plethora of dedicated .exe.
Let a user copy some file from the CD to his hd. Banal, even ancient Basic dialects would do that with few lines. Choose the source. Choose the destination, copy. Ok, supply a decent *uptodate* xml description of the cd content and Flash will do a funky menu system to choose the source. Fine, now do a standard OS 'Select Folder' dialogue. Flash: huh?? - ah, call the .exe guy, he'll do that copying business, too. (Flash won't).
Xtras. Just think of all the cool things you can add to directors native functionality, accessing a database engine sitting on the cd, reading/writing the registry or gestalt data or 3d or system folders... Granted, just some dedicated exe will do all this for flash, too.
So, finally, you met all of your customers wishes and that c programmer mentioned more than once that s/he really is due to do some other job. Just 1 minor thing, says your customer, we need some minor change to the folder structure on that cd... - if you applied some defensive programming and did the app with director you'll probably have to change some lines of lingo, might be just 1 variable, and test again. In Flash? ehemm, your luck depends on some arbitrary details with all those .exe...
Oh, we're talking x-platform? Make that 3 plethora times 2, then...
best regards
daniel plaenitz
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