Practice makes...

...well, if not perfect, at least experienced. Listed below are some files on the site that you can use in your Director experimentation. Since they're online, they're useful for testing out web-savvy links, online external cast members and Lingo scripts. They're on the root level of this server, so the exact URL of each is this domain plus their name (i.e., www.demystified.com/text1.txt).

AUTODONE.DIR is the completed version of the exercise in Chapter 12, which is also used for downloading in Chapter 22.

pic1.gif is a simple GIF image, used as a guinea pig for the online file-access exercise in Chapter 22.

text1.txt is the text component used in the following exercise.

countwords.txt is a simple yet useful file that doesn't pop up in the book, but can come in handy in your day-to-day scripting. It's nothing but a text file of the numbers 1 through 100, each written as a single word (i.e., 86 is "eightysix"). What's that good for? Well, if you've got a script that grabs or monitors a specific location in a text string, you can point it at this file to make sure it's looking in the right spot. If a line like put word 8 of myVar turns up with "nine" when myVar contains the countwords text, you've started to pinpoint the problem.

Drum3 is an online version of the "Drum Polyrhythm 3" sound file on the Demystified CD-ROM. It's sampled in 8 bit mono, 22.357 kHz sound, runs 22 seconds playback length, and weighs in with a file size of 500K.

tahoe.jpg is a larger graphic (111K) in JPEG format (thanks to my sister Moana for the digital photo). This is a good one for experimenting with downloading in the background. For instance, try writing a script that doesn't display the image until it's fully downloaded--make sure your script periodically updates the status of the download.

 

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