Using Flash Stubs and Director MX 2004 to create Engaging Applications

Whilst this may sound like the beginning of a tutorial, it’s not (at least not yet). I was fiddling around looking at a quick and easy way of creating a slick presentation that needed to present and open multiple document types (PPT, PDF, XLS, HTM) and stumbled across a great method for creating slick applications as Director Projector .EXEs.

Basically, creating the interface in Flash, importing the Flash movie into Director, adding a bunch of code to handle the incoming Director based function calls from Flash. I then hooked the relevant buttons within Flash into Director using the getURL(‘lingo:DirectorFunction()’); method, passing directory name and the name of the file as parameters.

And Hey Presto! it all works beautifully, as it checks for the existence of the file handling application (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) before it tries to load the relevant document and displays appropriate messages if the application isn’t installed.

What i’m now working on is making the application more scalable by allowing it to auto-discover files within given directory structures and pushing that information into a modified Tree View component.