At 05:32 PM 9/18/00 +0100, Karina Steffens wrote:
>I think this is where I got mixed up thinking I can embed the Xtras: (D7
>online help file)
>"The Shockwave player includes the Xtras that support the most common
>features and media types. These include text; Flash; BMP, PICT, JPEG, and
>GIF file importing; sound management; and Shockwave Audio."
Yes, the player is the runtime engine which is the Shockwave plugin which
is part of the browser. It does have the most common Xtras. However, it's
possible (probable) to write something that uses other Xtras.
>The text (which is an embedded font) seems to be working, but the file
>importing is definitely not working - linked jpegs are not visible, and the
>GIF Xtra is failing to innitialise.
Generally under Shockwave you can't do anything that refers to an explicit
path on the user's drive. So if you have an importFileInto using drive
C:\myfile, it won't work. I presume your linked jpegs won't be happy.
>Would any Xtra that came from Macromedia and/or was declared as "shockwave
>safe" be already pre-packaged? If not, what do I need to do?
No. There are two components. Shockwave-safe means the developer is saying
the Xtra doesn't do anything that could be a security compromise. Of
course, even browsers themselves (even operating systems) have security
holes, but Shockwave-safe means that they believe it to be okay, either
because it doesn't do that sort of thing, or because they have appropriate
safeguards up to either alert the user or prevent unauthorized use or whatever.
But the second part is to package it. This requires a Verisign (for now)
certificate, and is a pain to get. Look under Xtras Packaging on the
Macromedia site. Packaging ensures, supposedly, that the Xtra that was
downloaded was really packaged by the people who were supposed to package
it. The scenario is this: suppose Flash Xtra was considered
safe. However, someone took an unsafe Xtra and renamed it to be Flash Xtra
and put it up in a way that you unknowingly unloaded the evil bad Xtra
thinking it was a good one. By using packaging, the thing you download
comes essentially certified as having been packaged up by Macromedia (or
whoever). It might still be dangerous, but at least you know who put it
together, and that no one has fiddled with it.
If you need a packaged Xtra from Macromedia, you can check with them to see
if they have a packaged version of it. They may or may not.
>God, I sound/feel like such a newbie! The trouble is, my company is almost
>solely Kiosk based (Museum and Heritage), and we never had to deal with
>shockwave (one or two movies in the past few years, all sans-Xtras)
Don't be too hard on yourself. I'd say that most people don't understand
how it works. In fact, even among developers of Xtras, some of us who have
been developing these things since the beginning still have questions on
some of the nuances. You're not an exception, by any stretch of the
imagination.
- Tab
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