A few questions...

Hey, folks!

Last week I posted a general question inquiring whether anyone has used MMF2 to develop screencast type work similarly to what Adobe Captivate can do.

Well, as it turns out, I was able to produce enough of a proof-of-concept for my boss that he has allowed me to develop are latest screencast project using MMF2. I'm excited about this, because I see that MMF2 will offer me greater functionality than Captivate could, especially in regards to being able to manipulate the computer environment from which the runtime application resides.

But I do have a few questions which I'm hoping people might be able to assist me with:

1.) We have developed a "sandbox" environment where we are allowing prospective customers to "test drive" our software product; the guide I am developing with MMF2 will consume the leftmost vertical-quarter of the screen real-estate, and other applications will display to the right of it. One issue we have in a beta test of our "test drive" is that some newbies get lost finding GUI objects in our product. So, I had the thought that the MMF2 application I develop will run subapplications (also MMF2 projects) which will appear (and point next to) the GUI object they can't find. My first question is whether I can create a MMF2 application that uses transparency for the background (and no border), so that essentially the only thing that displays in the application is the note and arrow which would point to the GUI object in question. Is that possible to create an application with a transparent background?

2.) Is it possible, either natively with MMF2 or with any known extension, to be able to detect a mouse-click hot zone that would reside OUTSIDE the application run-time area? (This way, I would know that the user has successfully clicked on the GUI object in question, and the subapplication would automatically close itself.)

3.) I'd like to set up a "master timer" such that the application would time how long it takes for the user to go through the entire Test Drive guide. Because this "sandbox environment" is on a Virtual Machine which, for security reasons, has been locked down from Internet access, I can't have the application send me an e-mail when the user completes the Test Drive. So, is there a way I can have MMF2 open Notepad and save the total time to a text file?


As always, thank you very much for your help!


Most sincerely,

RGBreality

All of these are theoretically possible to do. The trickiest one to do would be the first one. :)

Is it possible to set a background color (such as white), then specify that "white" is the alpha channel color (so that everything that is white becomes transparent)?

I think this is possible with the Transparency Object, although I haven't used it. It's supposed to work with subapps, as well.

You can have a global timer object or have a timer on each frame add to a global value each second or ms and then you can use ini++ to save the total time at the "application close" event.

Why do you need a counter when you can use MMF2's built in timing system? You can set it to 0 to reset it even. ;)

Hey, folks! Thanks for the feedback!

I have never heard of the "Transparency object." Is that a MMF2 native object, or one developed by a third-party? Sounds interesting to explore...

I did find a solution to my transparency issue for the sub-application. I set the Sub-application object to "pop up," then placed an Active object on the sub-application's (only) frame. Once I imported the graphic for the Active object, I then placed a Window Shape object on the sub-application's frame; I set the shape it is to use to be that of the Active object. The Window Shape object during run-time, then, created the alpha channel for me.

Again, thank you for all the feedback!


RGBreality

I have never heard of the transparency object.

However there is a Window Shape object that is one of the default objects. ;)

er... He's already using it. :confused:

Well, anyway, for #2 jusy use the Virtual Key object. Might be just calld the Key object in the list.