Action! Player from Macromedia is an application that can playback Action! presentations, but it cannot be used for creation or modification of Action! presentations. The Action! Player can be freely distributed so that others can playback the presentations that you create. Distributing copies of the Action! program is a violation of your license agreement.
This document describes the new features of Action! Player since version 1.0, explains how to play Action! presentations with it, and offers some handy tips on its use.
What's New in Action! Player 1.0.4
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• Improved presentation animation
Action! 1.0.4 features smoother animation In some situations the user may notice and improvement of up to 100% in comparison with versions 1.0. and 1.0.1. However, there are some issues to be aware of when running a presentation. Background tasks are now suspended while a presentation is playing. In most cases this will not present a problem the background task willtemporarily stop, and pick up right where it left off when the presentation stops playing. Nonetheless, time-sensitive background tasks such as modem operations or background printing, may experience a device timeout if running in the background. If this occurs, modem connections will generally be interrupted, and printing will need to be restarted.
Using Action! Player
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You can open Action! presentations with Action! Player in two ways:
1) Double-click the Action! Player icon to launch it, then use the Play dialog that appears to select a presentation to open.
2) Drag and drop an Action! presentation onto the Action! Player icon to launch the Action! Player and open that presentation.
Note: Double-clicking an Action! presentation will NOT launch Action! Player. It will only launch Action! itself (if it is available). You must use one of the two methods described above. Action! Player will open only one presentation at a time.
Once you have opened a presentation, you can play it by choosing Play Presentation from the Control menu. Play Presentation always starts playing from the first scene. You can also play a particular scene by choosing it from the Scenes menu and then choosing Play from the Control menu.
To make a presentation play immediately upon opening, hold down the Option key when dragging the Action! presentation over the Player icon or when opening an Action! presentation from within the Player. Hold down the Option key until the “Loading Action document” message appears on the screen.
When an Action! presentation is playing, it occupies the full screen of the main monitor. The menu bar will be hidden but still functional.
You can stop the presentation at any time by pressing the Escape key, pressing Command-period, or choosing Stop from the Control menu in the invisible menu bar. When you stop the presentation, the Presentation window and menu bar reappear.
You can also pause a presentation at any time by pressing the Space bar. Press the Space bar again to resume playing.
Choose Quit from the File menu to return to the Finder.
Tips for using Action! Player
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• Action! Player is shipped with its preferred RAM memory requirement set to 2850K. An application partition of this size is usually adequate for playing presentations with several scenes when your main monitor is set to 256 colors. If you want to play larger presentations (especially ones with many PICTs, sounds, or movies) or if you have set the Monitor control panel so that your main monitor has thousands or millions of colors, you will need to increase the amount of RAM dedicated to Action! Player in order to avoid getting out-of-memory errors.
You can tell the Finder to give more memory to Action! Player by selecting the Action! Player icon, choosing Get Info from the Finder’s File menu, and increasing the number in the box labeled “Preferred size” in the Memory Requirements part of the Action! Player Info dialog.
• Improved external file searching
Action! will now let you search for externally referenced files (PICS, AIFF, or QuickTime™) that have been moved from their original location. Action! first looks for the file in the folder that contains the presentation file, if the file isn't there, Action! will ask you to find the externally referenced file. To insure uninterrupted loading, leave these files in their original locations or move them to the folder in which the Action! presentation is located.
• If the “drag and drop” method of playing presentations doesn’t seem to work for the Player, try rebuilding your desktop file by holding down both the Option and Command keys while you restart your Macintosh. Keep them held down until you see the message
Are you sure you want to rebuild the
desktop file on the disk “____”?
Comments in info windows will be lost.
and then click OK. If you have multiple drives, a separate message will appear for each one if you are still holding down the Option and Command keys; you need only rebuild the drive containing the Player.
• Action! Player takes advantage of “G-World” RAM that may exist on some video display cards. Using a video display card with this type of RAM significantly improves the smoothness of presentations being displayed. Note: this is only the case when the main monitor is being driven by the video board with the G-World RAM.
• When using Adobe Type Manager, increasing the Font Cache allows PostScript fonts to animate faster in Action! Player.
