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From: Erhard Zrust on 6 Nov 2007 03:48
yep, I've also been thinking of that already, but what would have cost them
something like "we are shipping it now and should there be problems with Lep,
we will release an update."
So that can only be a part of the reason. I think it was more difficult to
move the team to Bangalore and lose Tom than Adobe expected. As for me, all of
this is ok because it makes me feel that the guys are serious about making a
good app (he you guys out there, be honest, Director with its legacy of code
dating back to something like the eighties and outlasting something like 3
major changes in how to perfectly manage a software project must be a beast to
handle :frown;)

Anyways, I can understand that a major change can not be achieved overnight
and for this I was really pleased of the info I got from the MAX presentations,
which make me think that they have realized where the problems are and are
going into the right direction (well, saying this I hope that Havok or
something similar will again be onboard, without it, it would be hard to code
my apps)

The only thing that I find confusing is this non-disclosure policy from Adobe.
Hell, there is a strong and devoted userbase out there. I know many people who
would love to go back to Director, even when they already have migrated to
Flash or Java for some reasons. Why? Well, simply because despite of what the
people say Director was always nice to code with Lingo, it could be used better
than any app I know (I know Flash) by designers AND coders (e.g. I know some
out there who never saw any lingo, me I never used the score) and it can be
used to do a hell lot of things.

If I were Adobe I would use this userbase as a gift sent by heaven, and
integrate it into the process of getting the app to life again. This is what
I'm somehow missing and I fear that time's running out.

From: liveoak on 7 Nov 2007 14:12
[q][i]Originally posted by: [b][b]Erhard Zrust[/b][/b][/i]
So that can only be a part of the reason. I think it was more difficult to
move the team to Bangalore and lose Tom than Adobe expected.[/q]
Well, I think one issue is that there might have been "no team" to move - with
the neglect on Macromedia's part, I can;t imagine anyone many programmers
wanted to stay on the project.

Part of me wonders if the crew in India had to start wading through the
ancient Director code, solely based on it's internal documentation, and try to
figure out what was going on.

If DIrector merely starts to come up to speed with modern OS's and cleans up
it's major issues that's a start for me (proper handling of characers is first
on my list - no distinction between audio files named "horse" and "Horse", fore
example) .


From: Mike Blaustein on 7 Nov 2007 15:11
As a side note, there is an easy little hack to do case-sensitive
comparisons. Normal Lingo is not case sensitive (which is something
that I got one like about it), there for

put "horse"="Horse"
-- 1

It thinks that they are the same. But items in a list are case-sensitive.

put ["horse"]=["Horse"]
-- 0

so, it is pretty easy to make those comparisons if you wish.
From: liveoak on 7 Nov 2007 19:35
Yes, we do all go to great lengths to determine characters. I have thousands of
lines of custom code that converts each character to ASCI to force a character
by character comparison all over my programming.

But I'm talking about the way that casts are "sort of like databases" but
really aren't. They are databases in that they allow us to use thousand of
elements and reference them on the fly. But they fail in that they can't
distinguish between similar but not identical cast names.

Create 2 internal sound cast members, "Horse" and "horse", and use lingo to
play them -

sound(1).play(member "horse")
sound(1).play(member "Horse")

Both times the same sound (the one that appears first in the cast) will play.

put member("Horse").number
put member("horse").number

Both give the same member number (or cast, if you substitute that for
"number").

All sorts of problems with umlauts as well. This is the sort of thing that
really needs to be fixed in Director 11 to move it forward!

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