The applications in this book are cross-platform. In fact, many of the figures show either a Macintosh or a PC interface. Apart from the Operating System differences, you should have no difficulty working through this book using your computer. To ensure both sides of the computing divide are accommodated, we will show keyboard commands in the following manner:
Menu commands are treated a bit differently. They are presented as Menu, Submenu, Submenu. For example:
Keyboard commands do differ between the platforms. They will be shown as Keystroke-Keystroke, followed by the platform to which it is applicable in parentheses. The previous example told you to press the Control and N keys if you use a PC or the Command and N keys if you use a Macintosh. In certain cases, you will be asked to use the mouse to complete a particular task. This is also an area where platform differences are evident. Contextual menus are the poster children for this. On a PC, the instruction is:
The Macintosh is a bit different. Though the Macintosh world is increasing populated with third-party mice containing a second mouse button, Apple has always provided a one-button mouse. In this case, the Mac instruction would be:
The cross platform instruction would be:
Code is unavoidable when building Dynamic Sites. Throughout the book, you will be asked to enter, change, or optimize code. There will be three major code languages used throughout the book. The first is the one that drives the webHTML. The second is the language that drives FlashActionscript. And the third is the language that drives DirectorLingo. In all cases, code will be easy to identify due to the use of a special typeface. For example, a code listing will look like this: <HTML> <Head> <title> Hello World!</title> </head> </HTML> When code needs to be changed, we indicate the change in this manner: On exitFrame Go to the frame End By showing the code in bold text, you can quickly identify what needs to change and where the code is located. Using bold italic type as shown then indicates the change: On exitFrame Go to frame 3 End In this case, the instruction you would follow is presented in the following manner:
The last thing you need is a 500-page typing lesson. To avoid these, we will, on occasion, explain why the change is being made or the purpose of the code being entered. An example would be explaining the purpose of a line of Actionscript in Flash: If_(framesloaded,=_totalFrames){ This book also follows a few typographical conventions:
|