Every once in a while, I realize there's some simple, little thing about how an icon behaves that I've totally misunderstood. Often, if I'd come to that understanding earlier, I could have saved myself hours of time and made my code much neater and more efficient, to boot.

For instance, I've avoided putting Displays into Interaction out of simple lack of understanding of how the Erase settings on Interactions can work in my favor. One example of this is that I often wind up with twice as many icons in a Framework entry pane as I need. For many years, I thought there was no way to keep the Display part of an interaction with Perpetual responses in it on screen after the flow had passed through it. One day I realized that selecting "Don't Erase" in the first field on the Interaction tab in the Interaction's Icon properties dialogue will keep that Display on screen.

Similarly, a couple of years ago, I had a problem with buttons going into the inactive state while the flow was inside responses attached to the Interaction. I wound up using Active If for the buttons, along with the "Hide when inactive" checkbox.

Now I know that selecting Erase "After Next Entry" at the Interaction would not only erase the Interaction's Display, but also the buttons attached to the Interaction. The Display and the Interaction would be redrawn when the flow looped back around for Try again, or had finished with all options set to Continue.

I am always amazed by the simple beauty of the icons, but never more than when I am hit by the realization that some awkward workaround I'd been using was only made necessary by my own lack of understanding.

Authorware's color palette can be very limited. One way around this is to use the fine screen texture included with Authorware to blend your own color, but this can make text on top of the blended color difficult to read. Another solution that gives you a flat expanse of color is to create a 1 pixel by 1 pixel file in the color you want in a graphics editor.

You can import this single pixel into Authorware and stretch it to cover the entire screen, giving you a custom, colored background that takes very little space in your file.

I see that there are a lot of ".mil" addresses on my mailing list. My military friends tell me they find it impossible to go to an Authorware conference, because the military won't send them to Europe and they can't get funding unless it's between January and June.

If someone (me, for instance) held a conference timed to make it easier for Military and government personnel to come, would you be interested? Take the poll and let me know what you think! I'm thinking about this time next year for this conference.

I am constantly amazed at the fact that the guys at Mojo give away such great products for free. This week, I was having problems getting a graphic stored in RecordsLocation to print in an RTF document. For some reason, the RTFObject version released with Authorware 6.5 does not display images referenced by an expression.

I posted my problem to the Aware List, and Chris Swenson helpfully pointed me to Mojo Poorman Report, which has a function that will turn that graphic into RTF code and insert it into the document. Chris saved my bacon once again!

I'd like to point out, in case you're wondering, that no one has ever paid a dime to have a banner on my site, and I never mention products because their creators asked me to. All endorsements on the site and in the newsletter are strictly unsolicited.