Indie FAQ

How can I make it more obvious when the contents of an answer view changes?

>I have received the complaint that it's kind of hard to tell when there is
>new feedback.  For example, there are times when the feedback stays the
>same.  The student hasn't really fixed the problem, so the answer stays the
>same.  Can anyone think of an inexpensive way to make it LOOK like it's
>been updated?  Something in the way it displays the answer, maybe?

You can make the text appear to "flash" by putting a "Clear answer view" model action right before the "Submit argument" model action.

Can widgets be on more than one layer?

No. We've tried pretty hard to make it impossible to author it that way, but even if you find a way to do it, don't.

Can I have a scrolling item over a background?

Ben: "It seems that scrolling an evidence viewer causes redraw problems with PICTs which are underneath. What are our options here? Solid background?"

Wolff: "Solid background. The Mac basically just doesn't support scrolling over a textured background. Unless you know some ILS project where it was done and the programmer can tell us how it's done."

How do I make a "hot spot"?

Either:

Don't. Use a picture button, where the picture is the image that you want to appear under the "hot spot".
Use a borderless text button with no text on it. You'll probably want to assign the button a description to help you keep track of it.

How come I get the GC cursor a lot, Indie crashes a lot, etc.?

Frequent GCing (cursor changes to the letters "GC") is *not* normal and if it's occurring it's slowing down your work substantially. It's happening because you're running out of memory. You need to give Indie more memory, in one of two ways:

If you get frequent GCing that gets worse the longer you play:

Increase the total amount of memory allocated to Indie in the Finder. (Use the "Get Info" window on the tool.) Once you're using big graphics and movies, which I assume you are now, you'll want to go up to about 16000K. Remember that you'll need to do this to every new tool version you download!

Or, if you get a lot of GCing at the beginning, but less and less the longer you play, then:

Increase the default Mac heap size for your GBS. It's a slot in the GBS preferences object (down at the bottom of the Objects menu). 6000 is a good number to try for a reasonably large GBS. You only have to set this once for your GBS; the setting is saved in your GBS file.

Usually having insufficient memory will just cause lots of GCing and an error dialog, but it some cases it seems that it causes random-seeming system crashes.

When I try to play a movie, I get a weird error where it says it can't find movie content and asks me to find the new movie content. After a while (and hitting cancel), it gives up. Either that, or it says it's translating the movie from some other format. What's wrong?

Could be one of two things:

You made your movie wrong. Quicktime tries to save space by letting you store only one copy of the content even though it's used in several different files. Worse yet, you're trying to play a movie that isn't in quicktime format or is in an old version of quicktime. You also have the Macintosh Easy Open control panel in your control panels in your System Folder.
Indie and the Macintosh Easy Open control panel don't always get along real well. Macintosh Easy Open likes to do weird things with movies. If you're experiencing any strange behavior with Indie, particularly when choosing movies for answers/firmers, or when playing movies, you may want to try turning off Macintosh Easy Open and see if the problem goes away.

How do I type a bullet (or other special character)?

In most text editing boxes in Indie, Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts are enabled. These shortcuts use the Control and Option keys. Unfortunately, this means that when you want to type a special Mac character such as a bullet, you can't just type Option-8 (or Option-whatever), because Indie will think you're typing an editor shortcut.

Therefore, to type a bullet or other special character involving the Option key, you have to type Control-Q first. Then you can bullet, cedillafy, omegamate, and ligaturize to your heart's content.