INSTALLING THE XTRA ON MAC OSX - Director MX 2004

Double-click the installation .dmg file. This will mount a disk named "Arca Database Xtra" on your desktop.

The first step is to copy the OSX version of the Xtra, which will be used in the authoring environment and also when creating OSX projectors. This file is located in the install disk image, at:

Arca Database Xtra/Mac Carbon/Arca Database Xtra

This file needs to be copied to the Director MX 2004 Xtras folder. The final pathname for the OSX Xtra in a default installation of Director MX will be:

OSX Volume Name/Applications/Macromedia Director MX 2004/Configuration/Xtras/Arca Database Xtra

Director MX 2004 running on Mac OSX can also be used to create Classic projectors, for Mac OS versions 8 and 9. In order to enable this feature you need to copy the Classic version of Arca Database Xtra to the correct location in your Director MX installation. First locate the Classic version of Arca Database Xtra in the install disk:

Arca Database Xtra/Mac Classic/Arca Database Xtra

This file needs to be copied to the following location in the Director MX 2004 folder, to be used for cross-platform publishing. Copy it to:

OSX Volume Name/Applications/Macromedia Director MX 2004/Configuration/Cross Platform Resources/Classic MacOS/Xtras/Arca Database Xtra

Windows projectors can also be created directly on Director MX 2004 running on Mac OSX after installation of the Windows version of the Xtra. It is located on the install disk, at:

Arca Database Xtra/Windows/Arca.x32

Copy this file to the Cross Platform resources directory in Director MX 2004, so that it will be available at:

OSX Volume Name/Applications/Macromedia Director MX 2004/Configuration/Cross Platform Resources/Windows/Xtras/Arca.x32

Finally, you need to edit the xtrainfo.txt file to include information about Arca Database Xtra. This information is used by the Shockwave and cross-platform publishing features in Director MX 2004, to locate the files needed when assembling the Classic MacOS and Windows versions of your projector. The xtrainfo.txt file is located by default at:

OSX Volume Name/Applications/Macromedia Director MX 2004/Configuration/xtrainfo.txt

Double click the file to open it in TextEdit, or alternatively edit with another text editor. Make sure to save the file in plain text format, though. You need to add the following line to the end of the file:

[#namePPC:"Arca Database Xtra", #nameW32:"Arca.x32"]

Restart Director for the changes to take effect. The Xtra should be listed when you issue the command "put the xtralist" in the message window. The Xtra functions will also be listed when you click the message window Scripting Xtras button.