Re: FLASH: Need Mac projector

[K]

I have a kind of reverse situation where I work almost exclusivly on a mac,

but need to produce projectors for the pc.  My mac version of flash came

with a zipped file called "pc standalone players.zip", which I put on a pc

and used to make projectors of my swf files on the pc.  Although since I

don't have the pc version of flash, I don't know if mac players are

provided with it,  I would strongly suspect that would be the case.  (it's

in a folder called players inside the flash 3 folder on my mac).  You will

however still need access to a mac to run the stand-alone player and make

the projector.  If you don't have access to one, then I would be happy to

do it for you =).


As for burning it onto a CD, here I am afraid you may run into problems.

Instead of using a three-letter suffix to identify file types, macs store

this information invisibly in the "resource fork" of files (using file type

and creator code values). This has the advantages that you can have for

instance five different jpg files which are associated with five different

graphics programs and that no matter what you change the name of the file

to the mac will always know that it is a jpg (even if you name it

image.gif).


Unfortunately, unless you are running NT server with macintosh services,

when you move a mac file to a pc file, the resouce fork is lost, so that if

you then bring it back to a mac, the mac no longer knows what kind of file

it is.  Normally this is not a big deal, because when you double click the

file on the mac you will just get a dialog box asking you what program you

would like to open it in (or alternately you can open it from within the

desired program).  However, if the program is an application (like a

projector) you have a problem because the computer doesn't recognize it as

one and will try to make you open it inside another application.


In order for macs to be able to use the projector you will have to preserve

that resource fork information in some way.  The easiest way, as someone

else mentioned, would be to burn the CD on a mac, which has some very

flexible software for making hybrid CDs.  That, however, is not possible

for everyone.


An alternate solution would be compress the file using stuffit on the mac,

which would would result in a "name.sit" file that you could burn on the

pc.  This would require the end user to expand the file on their local

drive before viewing the movie, but it would preserve the resource fork

information.  .sit is the standard compression format on the mac, and it is

unlikely that you would find anyone without the ability to expand it.


Hope this helps =)


Karen



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