Do you ever get "developer's block," where you just can't seem to get the things you need to happen? One way to "jump start" the process is to write down the steps that need to happen in order to get to your goal. This is known as pseudocode.. Once you have the steps written down, you can use these as your comments.

For instance, today I was working on a word search program in Flash. One of the tasks is to fill a two dimensional array with a list of words so that each word is diagonal, horizontal, or vertical and none of the words overwrite any other word. The pseudocode for that process might go something like this:

Repeat once for each word in the list:

Repeat as many times as it takes to place a word, or until this has been tried n times:
Pick a random location in the array.
Check to see if the position is taken by a character that is not the first character in this word.
If it is not occupied by a conflicting character:
Set up a list of the 8 possible directions.

Repeat while there are still directions in the list:
Pick one of the directions, and delete it from the list.
Check to see if there are enough slots in the array in that direction to allow you to place the word there.
If so, check each slot to see if it is either empty or already occupied by the character you intend to place in it.
If all the slots are empty, place the word in it and mark it finished. Go to the next word.

Even though I used this pseudocode in Flash, the concept is the same in Authorware or any language.

I'd like to thank Steve Howard for giving me the idea for this Tip.

In Flash, you can define your own functions. One of the big beefs some programmers coming from other languages have with Authorware has been the fact that you have to "fake" functions with subroutines or Library icons.

In Authorware 6.5, you can write your own functions that can be contained in a new script icon, read in from a Text file, or interpreted from a string. This promises to totally change the way we use Authorware. Three cheers to the Authorware engineering team at Macromedia!!!
 

Are you facing the frustration of trying to deliver an Authorware piece on a Mac, or have you done so many Mac deliveries it is old hat to you? Come find out what others are doing and share your techniques in Part 1 of this 2-part chat.

In Part 2, tell the Macromedia engineers what you'd like to see in Mac packaging in the future.

The Date will be Saturday, Oct. 5

Part 1 starts at 10:00 am Central Daylight time (11 Eastern, 9 Mountain, 8 Pacific). This is 4:00 pm current UK time, 3:00 GMT. Guest chatters will be Marc Lee and Mike Mizen.

Part 2 starts one hour later.

With a little help from the ringmaster, I have finally gotten off my tushie and applied for membership in the Authorware web ring.

Now you can find my site alongside a lot of my favorite Authorware sites. Check it out!

I've been playing with my new copy of MX studio. I'm lukewarm on the new Flash MX, and I've barely touched Dreamweaver. But I have to tell you...I love the new Fireworks MX.

With Fireworks 4, we saw a whole new style of beautiful, luminous graphics on the Web. Fireworks MX makes this kind of graphics so much easier and quicker to produce, I think that in the future we'll be seeing a whole new style of graphics that is even more gorgeous.