A brief introduction to Director

26. Your Second Error

Another quick test run.

Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide

Online reader support forum for the book

Go ahead and close your Movie Script window. Director will test your syntax. If there's a problem, you'll be notified; make sure that what you've entered looks like the foregoing. Now save your file and run it by first rewinding the playback head and then clicking the play button. You should see the standard Director menu replaced by whichever menu is appropriate for your development system -- the menus you just defined.

If you select the About This Program... menu item now, though, Director will return an error. Click CANCEL. What's happened, of course, is that you issued the AboutBox() handler call without actually defining precisely what AboutBox() is or does (that's what that "| AboutBox()" stuff is doing after the About This Program... menu item, after all).

To do this now, let's go back to your trusty Movie Script. Below your LoadMenus() handler definition, add the following text:

  on AboutBox

    ALERT "This 'Hello, World' program was written by [your name] using Macromedia Director."

  END AboutBox

Note that there are only single quotation marks used around the title "Hello, World" in the ALERT above. You can include double quotation marks using a bit of fancy text-handling. For now, remember that anything in an ALERT phrase which is to be seen onscreen is delimited at the beginning and end only by double quotes; everything within those quotes must be single-quoted.