Chapter 5. Introducing Lingo

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn about Director's event hierarchy

• Be introduced to the DOM and core objects

• Build a generalized button behavior

• Learn about properties and variables

• Create a custom dialog for a behavior

• Learn to fade sounds using Lingo

Approximate Time

This lesson should take you about 2 hours to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files:

None

Starting Files:

events.dir

portfolio_start.dir

Completed Files:

portfolio.dir

This is the fifth lesson in the Portfolio Presentation project. In this lesson you'll get to know more of the Lingo necessary for creating advanced projects as you add functionality to the portfolio project.

The completed portfolio project

First, let's talk a little history. Lingo was first introduced in 1988 when VideoWorks Interactive Pro became Director 1.0. At that time John Henry Thompson and the lesser-known Erik Neumann replaced the original Tiny Basic engine with the Lingo scripting engine. Since its inception, Lingo has evolved from a somewhat cumbersome and verbose language into the robust object-oriented and dot-syntax-enabled language it is today.

To be able to create more advanced applications and interactivity, you'll need a good solid foundation in Lingo. Knowing how Director passes events to various objects and how to handle those events is the first step in your understanding. Along with that, you'll explore the new Director Object Model (DOM), which is new in Director MX 2004. You also learn how to generalize behaviors using properties and how to use the getPropertyDescriptionList handler in order to produce custom dialog boxes for your behaviors.