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For our first program we don't really need much by way of complex
menus. There's nothing, really, to copy to a clipboard, nothing to
paste anything into, no highly complex operations that might require
online help, nothing really to send to a printer, and so on. So we can
get away with installing minimal menus for this program.
The first step is to drag the playback head in
the Score window to an unused frame — perhaps frame 30 or 40. What you
should see in front of you is simply a blank Stage. What you do next is
going to depend on which version of Director you're running: With
Director 4, click the "A" button on the Tool Palette; with Director 5+,
click the button with the word FIELD in it.
When you move the mouse pointer over the Stage it
should change its shape from an arrow to an I-beam. Just click and drag
anywhere near the upper-lefthand corner of the Stage, and you will have
created a new field.
(You use the FIELD button in Director 5+ because
the other type won't work for making menus. Anti-aliased text is not at
all the same as field text, and was a new feature in Director 5, and
it's pretty neat, though it's important to remember the difference
between this kind of text and FIELD text.)
Next you'll want to set up the menu for your dominant platform — the platform you're authoring under.
For Macintosh, since we're just putting in menu items for programmer's
credits and to allow the user to quit the program, we only need to put
in two menus, each with one item: An Apple menu and a File menu.
In the field you've just created, you'd enter the following (I'll go
into both Mac and Windows menuing below, since knowing how to build
decent menus for both platforms is pretty important)...
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A brief introduction to Director