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February 20, 2006
Coming soon: Shockwave update release, including new Flash & QuickTime Asset Xtras!
Hey folks, I just wanted to post up a quick grass-roots style announcement that within the next month we will be posting an update to the Shockwave Player (version 10.1.1) that among other items includes two major bits of importance:
- Flash 8 Asset Xtra
- Bug-fixed QuickTime Asset Xtra
This will be a free player update complete with all new posted installers in addition to being a free update for Director authoring as well (developers will be able to download the updated bits from the Director Support Center's downloads page).
The new Flash 8 Asset Xtra will allow developers to incorporate Flash 8 authored SWF files into their Director projects in order to tap into the new Flash player features like the improved Flash video codec and the imaging filter effects. This new Flash 8 Asset Xtra will also expose a new function/sprite method named "convert", that function converts between Lingo image objects and Flash bitmapdata objects as well as between Lingo linear lists and Flash array values. There are plans to expand the convert() method/funtion over time but for now it's focused on only a few data types.
The QuickTime Asset Xtra has been updated to fix a few crash related issues as well as to allow the use of QTVR sprites on Windows while the end-user has QuickTime 7 installed. With the release of QuickTime 7 for Windows we saw a number of issues appear within Director and Shockwave that needed to be fixed, we identified the key issues and believe we have them well sorted for this release.
There are other updates in this release as well, some other functional bug fixes as well as some security-related updates, all of which will be described in relevant tech notes found in the Director Support Center. In addition we will be posting a new documentation addendum that discusses the new features provided via the Flash 8 Asset Xtra as well as a Director Developer Center article (written by yours truly), through all of this we hope to explain what new capabilities will be exposed and how Director developer's can utilize those - code samples will be included!
There are still details to share so I will of course answer any questions that come up, but please understand that we are planning to post all the necessary information at the time we post the new bits for live consumption on our website.
Posted by thiggins at February 20, 2006 02:58 PM