Special Edition Using Director 8.5 [Paperback]

Special Edition Using Director 8.5 is a comprehensive guide to creating and publishing Director movies. In this book you'll find complete coverage of Director 8.5, from advanced issues such as Lingo scripting and multi-user applications to how to employ the hot new feature of the 3D API. This edition includes more coverage of multi-user applications, using 3D media, efficient sprite editing with the context-sensitive Property Inspector, increased control of cast members (sorting by name, date, type, size) through the Cast Manager, vector drawing tools that add illustration capability, and special imaging effects and Transition Behaviors to add pizzazz and drama to applications. As an added bonus, Special Edition Using Director 8.5 has nine appendixes that include keyboard shortcuts, a Lingo reference, and a behavior library quick reference.

Gary Rosenzweig is the chief engineer, founder, and owner of CleverMedia, a game and multimedia development company in Denver, Colorado. This is his sixth book on Director.

Before the multimedia industry started, he was a computer science student at Drexel University in Philadelphia. There, he took a greater interest in journalism than computers. After working for years in various positions at the student newspaper, he eventually rose to the position of editor-in-chief.

Gary followed his journalistic interests to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a master's degree. As an undergraduate, he found that he was someone who knew a lot about publishing at a school where everyone was a computer expert. In graduate school, he found that he was someone who knew a lot about computers at a school where everyone was involved in publishing.

While in school, he got his first taste of a scripting language with Hypercard 1.0. Although class projects were done in Pascal, C, and other "serious" programming languages, Gary found that he was able to build programs for freelance jobs with Hypercard in a fraction of the time.

After school, rather than enter one field or another, Gary combined both and began freelancing for publications to build multimedia products. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Denver to take a job at Ingenius, an educational news service partially owned by Reuters. It was there that he began using Director all day, every day.

As a serious developer, Gary went to bookstores to find books on Director. Seeing none, he decided to write one. He then published the book, free, on the Internet. Soon after that, he was paid to rewrite and update the book as The Comprehensive Guide to Lingo.

After the book was published, Gary left Ingenius and started his own company, CleverMedia. This was made possible because of Shockwave, which gives users the capability to play Director movies on the Web. Demand for Shockwave applets rose and CleverMedia was hired by many companies, both large and small, to build Shockwave applets. Today, CleverMedia owns four of the largest Shockwave and Flash game sites on the Web and creates games for many of the others.

Gary lives in Denver, Colorado, with wife Debby, a cat named Lucy, and a dog named Natasha. Other than computers and the Internet, he also enjoys film, camping, classic science fiction books, and writing. Personal Home Page: http://www.garyrosenzweig.com E-mail: http://www.garyrosenzweig.com/email.html