Shockwave3d + Safari Play Together

Douglas Edric Stanley

2005.12.08

Enfin!

Safari finally fixed the Director Shockwave 3d offset bug.

This took a while. If you’ve already seen my Rubik’s Cube® transformed into a DJ-sequencer, you might have noticed while using Safari that the 3d didn’t display correctly : it printed the cube too high on the screen, sometimes drawing directly into the window titlebar. The situation actually got worse, before it got better: the offset seemed to move around depending on which Safari version you were using. So you couldn’t even correct for it — which would have been a hack anyway, and I try to avoid them when I can.

Abstract Machine : ^3

Anyway, the bug has finally been fixed. Here’s the original Macromedia Tech Note as well as a blog discussion on Shockwave and Webkit.

A searched around and tried to find an official word on what went right for once : here’s Tom Higgin’s Blog Entry on the subject. I actually learned of the fix while trying to show a student how the bug used to work, rather than getting it from the horse’s mouth. As I’ve already mentioned, I don’t really take all that seriously Macromedia’s Adobe’s word when it comes to Director. I’ve just been trying to ignore them. Unfortunately, a lot of my current work is tied up in their platform : ugh! At least this makes one less thing to worry about. Now if the jerks company who took over my fetish MIDI xtra could create a decent licencing model, i.e. NO licencing contract! Oh, why couldn’t I have gone for an open-source solution from day one?