Have you ever wished you could use the polygon tool to draw perfect stars, triangles, and arrows? Objects drawn with Authorware's drawing functions are smaller than imported graphics, and take fewer system resources to display and move. It sometimes seems, though, that it is difficult to draw anything with them more complicated than circles and squares.

However, you can create any shape made with straight lines perfectly with the polygon tool. The first step is to turn on the grid by selecting "Grid" from the View menu. Next, select "Snap to Grid."

Now you can use the polygon tool to draw the shape you want, and the angles will be perfect. Don't worry if you have to draw the shape really large to get the angles right, just worry about the shape.

Once your shape is right, you can select it with the pointer. Hold down the shift key and drag the lower right corner toward the upper left corner to scale your shape to the size you need it. Voila! A perfect shape, drawn with Authorware's drawing tools.

You can use "Step Into" to traverse the flow icon by icon, even if your file executes a JumpFile() command. If you are stepping through your file with the "Step Into" button on the Control Panel, and you press a button or take another action that jumps to a second file, the flow at the second file will pause after the first icon.

If you press Ctrl-2 in the new file, this will reopen the Control Panel so that you can continue stepping through the second file.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes the "Reset" button in OBP does not work to stop files from using the Publish settings of another file? Chris Swenson, of MojoMole, has once again come to the rescue.

He created a .u32 that creates a new GUID that you can use with SetFileProperty to reset the GUID for your file. Note that all settings will be lost, so you may want to export settings before you use it. He has not posted a link to access it from his site, so for the time being, the only place you can find it is the link above.

The code to use it is very simple:

SetFileProperty(#awCrsGUID, MCreateGUID())

Hope you find it useful.