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Tutorial 2: Menus and Menu System Creation

Tutorial 2: Menus and Menu System Creation

WFS4Tutorial2.zip (free download) is a 6.8 Mb DCR (and its HTML file) with 45 minutes of audio/visual instruction/simulation in the Director authoring environment that painlessly shows/tells you all you need to know to construct menu systems with WFS.

Your purchased copy of WFS comes with WFS4Tutorial2.DIR in the 'samples' folder. This is a DIR of the menu system constructed in the WFS4Tutorial2.zip tutorial.

Those who haven't yet purchased WFS 4 can check out WFS4Tutorial2.zip to see if WFS meets your menuing needs. Those who have purchased WFS 4, for best learning results, may wish to have WFS4Tutorial2.DIR open in Director while you play WFS4Tutorial2.zip in your browser so you can change the Parameter Dialog Boxes and experiment while the WFS4Tutorial2.zip tutorial plays. Use the pause button to pause the tutorial and other nav features in WFS4Tutorial2.zip to navigate the tutorial, or let it play through.

Please do tutorial 1 before doing WFS4Tutorial2.zip.

You will need a minimum screen resolution of 800x600 to view the entire stage of the tutorial. Best viewed at a resolution beyond 800x600; if you use 800x600, you'll have to go full screen in the browser.

More about Menus

After you do WFS4Tutorial2.zip, check out the HTML documentation concerning menus. It is accessible via the menu at the top left of this page under 'Menu docs'.

Also, WFS4Tutorial2.zip creates quite a normal-looking type of menu. So you may want to have a look at Scene 5 of the feature tour to get a sense of how non-standard menus can look, yet still behave like menus. Also, have a look at Scene 7 for a more complete menu than is created in tutorial 2. And check out Scene 6 to see how to create a right-click menu (Control+click on Macs). The source code for these scenes is in WFS48x.DIR, which is in the 'samples' folder of your documentation.

The menu to the left on this HTML page is another example of a WFS menu; usually WFS menus are for Director apps, but as you see on the left, they can sometimes be suitable for HTML projects like this documentation. I looked at a lot of DHTML menuing systems, and some of them were very nice, but usually the cross-browser/cross-platform Javascript issues were problematical.

If you are creating a projector, you should know that Director supports menus for creating projectors. Search for 'menu' in the Lingo Dictionary for more info. These are fairly standard-looking menus. If, however, you're creating Shockwave work, Director does not natively support the creation of menus (hence the WFS menus). I also created the Menu Manager and its accompanying behaviors because a menuing system naturally accompanies a windowing system. Menuing systems are very much like windowing systems, and one usually wants both in one package, if possible.