We wanted to start the new tour with a bang. So we enlisted the help of a couple fellow artists and animators, Richard Bamattre and MichiganJ.S*, to create an intro movie.
A New Look
The appearance of the tour has changed. This was refreshing change from the past, to say the least. We thought a little bit ahead about the look of the new tour, and designed the interface to be interchangeable. That means that we can give the tour a brand new look in the future, without changing a bit of code! To give proper credit, Richard Bamattre is the artist behind the look of the new interface.
Global Music Controller
If anyone has ever used the old tour for long enough, they should know that all the song stuff was on one page. If you never went to that page, you wouldn’t know that there are four songs on each CD – not just one song playing over and over.
Improved Music Page
In addition to the global music controller, the music page now includes a picture space for the artists, along with linked websites and/or email.
Simplified Controls
There are less pages, hence, less clutter (although there are a lot of lovely raytraced balls in the background which can be considered clutter – ha ha).
The new tour is very beta. There are glitches. We know there are glitches. Here is a list of known problems:
About Version 1.1ß4
- If you don't want to wait for the intro video to finish, just click on it with the mouse button.
- The fonts displayed with funky colors in Mac OS X 10.1. This should be fixed.
About Version 1.1ß3
- Finally! An ON/OFF switch on the music controller, as well as a volume slider.
- The songs play sequentially, rather than looping.
- Another tweak to the music controller's appearance
- Added a splash screen for advertising opportunities (not a popular choice, but it had to be done.
About Beta 12
- Buttons are now in order
- Still no on/off button or volume controller...sorry.
- Minor graphic glitches fixed.
- Minor tweak to music controller background
- Funky text that appeared in the banner section should not appear any more.
The Bugs
- Main Menu lacks action. In the future, the main menu will serve as an “instructional guide” to the tour.
- The buttons are out of order. That accounts for the odd graphic anomalies surrounding each button. That should be fixed in the next version.
- There is no volume slider. This is being addressed. We couldn’t get it to work by deadline, so we removed it. You’ll have to set the volume in your Finder in the meantime.
- The black void that makes up the music controller will be replaced with something a little more … there, we guess, in the next version.
- There might be a pause before the first banner ad shows up.
- In the Carbon version, the tour may give an error message when quitting the application. No big deal, but it’s ugly.
- Sometimes a banner won’t show up. Rather, you get some ugly gibberish. We’re looking into this.
- The menu bar didn’t make prime time. In the future, you can access the pages from the menu bar. We’d like to implement some extras in the menu bar, like a volume controller, help system, Easter Eggs, web links, etc.
There are sure to be more. By the time you read this, most of the bugs should be fixed. If you happen to find some that weren't mentioned above, feel free to write us at submissions@macaddict.com.
That said, here is a note from the man who coded this beast in what seemed like three days:
DISCLAIMER:
The new tour is beta software. We do not believe that it actually works properly, and neither should you. Run it if you want to see what we're trying, but expect things to crash, misbehave, and otherwise do entertaining things.
-The Management (well, actually just a very, very tired Ian Sammis)
