Several Windows Questions...

[Klaus Major]

Hi Jason,

> Hi there;
>
> New to Rev and trying to get the hang of things, especially related to 
> cross-platform issues.

Welcome to the club :-)

> I'm developing on Mac OS X 10.2 and then building my standalones for 
> Mac OS X, Windows and
> Mac OS PPC. My stacks are very simple, as I am not skilled at this 
> stuff by any means.
> Using it to build a vocabulary drill program.
>
> Here's the first issue:
>
> I have a stack that has a card for each of the vocabulary words used. 
> When each card is displayed,
> there is an image that hides the answer to the vocabulary word 
> displayed. The user guesses the
> answer and then clicks a button to reveal the answer and play an audio 
> file of the word being spoken.
> The button script in use is:
>
> on mouseUp
>     play "VocabData/VocabAudio/L1Vocab36.aif"
>    hide image "AnswerBlock" with dissolve
> end mouseUp
>
> Simple, no? The trouble is, the dissolve (and others elsewhere in the 
> stack) works great on the Mac during
> development and on the Mac standalones, but I'm having some troubles 
> when testing under Windows.
> Using Virtual PC with Windows XP and Windows 98, the dissolve works 
> normally (though slowly under
> emulation) yet on the PC laptop I have here, the dissolves don't 
> appear at all- there's just a delay during
> which the dissolve would normally occur then the "AnswerBlock" image 
> is hidden without a visual effect.
> This is under Windows ME on an older Pentium 200MHz. Is this lack of 
> dissolves due to Windows ME?
> Due to the slow processor on the laptop? Inquiring minds are looking 
> for an answer.

This could be a QuickTime related issue...

If you do not specify otherwise, RR will use QT for transitions.
But, especially on older and slower PCs, it takes a little (or more ;-) 
time to LOAD QT.

And QT is very memory/processor consuming!

You can "switch off" the usage of QT, then the RR built-in effects are 
used.
In your case the built-in dissolve is a little bit cheesy ;-) but it 
works...

Put this in the stack script and check it again:

on preopenstack
     set the dontuseqteffects to true
    ### do your stuff...
end ...

This way RR will not use QT for the transitions...

Hope that helps...

There is a trick concerning this phenomenon on:

http://www.sonsothunder.com/

-> Developer Resources -> Revolution

Scroll down to "QuickTime"

> Next Issue:
>
> When running my standalone under Windows (all three flavors mentioned 
> above), there is no
> tab in the Taskbar for my running application. Does this have anything 
> to do with setting the decorations to empty?

I am not sure, but i think so...

This is also the case when a stack is a "palette"...

> Next issue:
>
> I have several sub-stacks in my standalone. Under Windows, each of the 
> substacks appears as a separate
> task under the Task Manager, as if multiple programs are running. Is 
> this normal behavior?

Yes...

> Is there a way to make substacks not appear separately?

Sorry, no idea.

> Thanks for any help you can provide.

You're welcome :-)

> -Jason

Regards

Klaus Major
klaus at major-k.de
www.major-k.de