A brief introduction to Director

21. Launch Windows and Whatnot

Defining the Windows menu.

Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide

Online reader support forum for the book

All right, that's the raw Mac menu. Since the Windows version of the menu will be virtually the same (hey, we were smart and planned ahead), we can save ourselves a bit of typing by doing a shortcut procedure: Select the castmember in the Cast window that represents the menu you've just made and duplicate it.

To do this, just click on the box containing the menu (probably castmember number four or so) and press COMMAND+D (Mac) or CONTROL+D (Win) to duplicate the castmember. You should get an identical twin of your menu in the Cast window. Now use the mouse to drag the duplicate onscreen, below the original. This will be your second menu — the one to be used on the Windows platform. Naturally, it's going to look a little different. For the Mac menu, remember, you entered this:

  menu: @
  About This Program.../A | AboutBox()
  menu: File
  Quit/Q | QUIT

For Windows things are a little different, so change the second menu field to look like this:

  menu: File
  About This Program.../A | AboutBox()
  Exit/X | QUIT

Note that the "@" menu is no longer there; that's because on Windows, of course, there's no Apple menu, for a number of pretty self-apparent reasons. The About This Program... menu item has been moved to the FILE menu (ordinarily it would be under the HELP menu, probably, but there is no HELP menu required for this program).

In addition the other item under the FILE menu is the word Exit, not Quit. Note too that the command key has changed from Q to X — this is consistent with Windows interface design. That is, to exit a Windows program, one generally can type Control-X, just as one can type Command-Q on Mac. (Note however that the actual command associated with that item, QUIT, has not changed; this is internal to Director. Don't substitute the word EXIT for QUIT within your scripts.)