Top o' the morning y'all. I'm back, I've had a wee bit of sleep along with a
pint or three and some food. Ahhhh, that feels better. Picking up where we
left off yesterday...

> 1. From Grimmwerks: 
> At some point do you think you can fill up on the coffee and 
> write down every little thang?

As I've mentioned in other emails (here or elsewhere I don't immediately
recall), I'm going to roundn up all these posts/replies and try to put
together a technical FAQ document for those of you wanting more functional
details. The currently posted documents are really more of the "marketing
FAQ" variety and as such they don't deal with the type of information we're
all talking about. I'm meeting with some folks on Friday to see where should
post this information (tech note? DevNet article? other?) and so hopefully
sometime next week we'll have something up for you to read over. 


> 2. From Sean Wilson:
> Is there a performance penalty incurred by using JavaScript 
> syntax instead of "traditional" dot syntax <snip>?

Well, yes, there is. But that answer is qualified with "if you're comparing
JavaScript syntax in Director with Lingo in Director". Lingo is still the
fastest thing going and the JavaScript syntax engine we've implemented (the
SpiderMonkey engine from the folks at Mozilla) is slower than Lingo. But, if
you're comparing the speed of JavaScript syntax execution in Director with
either JavaScript in the browser or ActionScript in Flash, then I think
you'll be quite pleased as the performance is on-par with those if not
faster in some areas.


> 3. From Daniel Plaenitz:
> <a whole lot of Activation questions>

All of Macromedia's products are moving to the online activation scheme, but
now the license explicitly allows you to install and activate each copy of
Director on 2 machines of the same platform. So if you buy and activate on
your Windows box and work, you can either activate on another Windows
machine at work or another Windows machine at home. Same goes for Mac. Each
license is for a single platform, each license allows you to activate two
machines of that same platform. You can transfer your license if you need to
move from one machine to the other, but IIRC you can do that without ever
calling our customer service department (at least for the first 5 transfers
you don't, after that you'll need to call for each license transfer).

Let me know if you still have any questions about the Activation scheme.


> 4. From Troy Rollins:
> Questions about existing Xtras under MX 2004, transitions on 
> OSX, paint window, Fireworks connectivity and finally grouping
> of Flash sprites under one Xtra isntance.

While our beta program has in fact included a number of Xtra developers as
well as a multitude of users that use 3rd party Xtras, I still cannot
provide a definitive answer to your question of "how should we expect our
transition to go?" That's dependant upon the Xtra, what it's trying to do,
how it was authored, etc. In general we didn't revamp MOA or the XDK so most
Xtras should function well enough, but do test things to be safe. On top of
that, if you plan on using the cross-platform publishing feature then your
Windows machine will most definitely require you to obtain updated Mac OSX
Xtra bits to place on your Win box so you can create OSX projectors (this is
not true for Mac machines producing Win projectors - Mac files that touch
your Win drive get whacked).

OSX transitions, the pain(t) window and Fireworks integration didn't get
focused on this release so I don't believe there are any changes in those
areas.

Oh, Flash member grouping eh? Honestly, this one is still in the lab with
the engineers working hard. The technique I showed at MAX last November was
this:

memberRef.commonPlayer = #someSymbol

All members whose commonPlayer property had the same symbol value were
loaded into and played by a single instance of the Flash Asset Xtra. As I'm
typing this I'm quite hesitant on saying more as we're still shaking out
some of the code. There are problems with the shared memory space that may
be problematic for code-heavy projects, so our engineers are busily working
away on this one. I'm in the 90+% zone for saying this _will_ be in, but
it's not a guaranteed item for sure (and I'm likely to be scolded for saying
this much anyway given that it's not a 100% certain deal AFAIK, oh well,
them's the breaks!).


Ok, so that's playing catch-up for yesterday's emails before I left, I'm now
off to respond to all the others that have collected since then.


Cheers,
Tom Higgins
Product Specialist - Director Team
Macromedia

Announcing Director MX 2004, de lekkerste!
http://www.macromedia.com/software/director

...

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