nightwares mini logoA brief introduction to Director

23. Ordering from the Menu

Preparing your menus for use.

Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide

Online reader support forum for the book

Now that you've defined your two menus you need to have a way to do the following two things:
 
1. Decide which menu is to be used based on which kind of system your program is running on; and


2. Tell your Projector which menu type to use based on that information.

Fortunately that's easy. For starters you'll want to name your menu castmembers. To do that, select one of them in the Cast window, and then click in the little text field at the top of the Cast window. You should be able to type in a name.

Make it something pretty mnemonic and specific to the menu type; for instance, you might name the Mac menu castmember helloMacMenu and the Windows one helloWinMenu. This allows you to tell, in the Cast window alone, what kind of menu you're looking at — and it allows Director to tell them apart now.

You could also use the number associated with the desired castmember, but that's not generally a good idea, since those numbers can change if, as often happens, the locations of the castmembers change in the Cast window.


1. Introduction

2. Definition of Objectives

3. Specific Objectives

4. Stage Size

5. Stage Location

6. Setting the Stage's Color

7. Beginning to Enter Script

8. A bit More About the StartMovie() Handler

9. Entering Another Handler

10. A Break-down of the CheckColor() Handler

11. A Quick Test

12. Adding Text to the Stage

13. Preparing to Enter a Frame Script

14. Entering the Frame Script

15. Adding a Quit Button

16. The Progress so Far

17. Preparing to Add a Menu

18. Discussion of Menu Requirements

19. Preparing the Menu Storage Member

20. Entering Menu Functions for Macintosh

21. Entering Menu Functions for Windows

22. Efficientlly Handling Multiple Menus

23. Preparing to Insert the Menus Onscreen

24. Adding the Menu Installation Handler

25. Discussion of the Menu Installation Handler

26. Adding Code for an About Box

27. Review of the Scripts

28. Creating a Projector and Running it