James:
I've xplatted piles of apps in Director; the principles asked about here
apply...
The number one rule is port early, port often. Test it out. Try your
stacks on different machines through the course of the development cycle
to make sure all is happening as it should.
> 1. What is the ideal size for the card?
If old color Macs are not in the running, 640 by 480 pixels is the
*maximum* safe area. If old color macs *are* in the running, 512 by 384
is as big as you can safely get. Those values will fill a Mac screen.
The top 20 pixels might be overcut by the menu, if you are installing a
menu, or the stack might get bumped down by 20 pixels to make room for
the menu. Try it and see what ahppens, or better still, ask Scott. ;)
Shoot for 256 colors, not 16, unless you can get by with 16. (Bitmaps
in 4-bit color look horrible compared to 8-bit, but ancient Mac LCs
cannot handle 256 colors at 640 by 480.)
> 2. Which font works best for cross platform applications.
Mac/Win have variants of Times, Helvetica/Arial and Courier. Onscreen,
sans serif fonts, such as Arial/Helvetica, are easiest to read.
The Mac fonts will probably display two points smaller than the Win ones
because Bill can't be bothered to do anything anyone else's way. Thus if
text alignment with images or other screen items is critical you'll need
to be careful of that.
> 3. Is it possible to deploy a stand alone application on a 3.5" floppy?
Installerless? It would have to be a very tight application with no SFX
or graphics -- well very few at least.
If you're distributing with an installer of course that's not a problem
since you can span.
CDs, however, are cheap, very robust (Mac floppies fail surprisingly
regularly), and have considerably more space on them... ;)
Hope this helped some!
--
warren ockrassa | nightwares | mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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