Dear Miguel,

I don't know if this is going to be even slightly helpful, especially as
some particularly learned solutions have already been posted, but this is
what I'd do with regards the whole copying/ animation thing. Rest of the
list, please feel free to upbraid me if this has been suggested already and
I just haven't understood it.

Basically I would just use a repeat loop and update a 'thing' one bit at a
time as stuff loads. IMHO, if a user is sitting looking at a computer while
it's copying half a ton of stuff, what they really want to look at is a
progress bar. This may not work that well with other sorts of animations,
but it might, depending on the size of files and so on. So, here's what I'd
do. First off, I'd create a Flash animation that's a thousand frames long,
or five hundred, or whatever works best. This would include a progress bar
that registers "empty" at the start and "full" at the end. It could also
include a windows-style 'stuff going from a to b' animation. I would then
put it on stage, and make sure that it was set to 'pause at start'.

I would then use a script as follows;

on <handler>
set numberoffilescopied = 1
repeat while numberoffilescopied < 1000
-- lingo to copy 1 file (don't know what you're using) - I would ether
retrieve the filename from a list using numberoffilescopied or name them 1 -
1000 and use string (numberoffilescopied) to generate the filenames --
set the frame of sprite x = numberoffilescopied
-- where x is the channel where your flash animation resides --
updatestage
set numberoffilescopied = numberoffilescopied + 1
end repeat
end

It might also be nice to add a keypress thing or something to break out of
the loop if people get impatient. The important bit here is the ' set the
frame of sprite x = ', which is the bit of lingo that advances a Flash
sprite one frame at a time, or indeed sets it to whatever point you want.
The good thing about this approach is it's simple and it works. The bad
things are a) it's not really what you wanted (i.e. multitasking), and b) it
might 'stall' if the file is particularly big. However, in my experience, I
don't think users will mind a couple of stalls, as this is exactly what
Windows does all the time, and people are more than used to it. It's not
what you were after, but it is a solution, which in my neck of the woods is
usually good enough.

Hope this is vaguely helpful.

Yours,

Richard


[To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to
http://www.penworks.com/LUJ/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!]

Reply via email to