Shockwave 7 FAQ

(Under Construction)

See also:

Q. What is new in SW7?

The new features in D7 are detailed on Macromedia's site, or see "New Features" in the on-line Help's index.

Q. What new bugs are there?

Q. What platforms does D7 and SW7 support.

A. SW7 supports PowerMac and Win 95/98/NT only. No 68K Mac support or Windows 3.1 support of any kind. You must provide such users a SW6 version of your DCR file. The Shockwave download center will accomodate users of these older OSes by pointing them to SW6 plug-ins.

Q. What is the relationship between SW7 and Slim Projectors (aka Thin, Lite, or Shim Projectors or System or Shockwave Players)?

A. A Projector built with the Use System Player option in the File>Create Projector>Options dialog box requires that the IMLlib and DPlib libraries from SW7 are installed in your System folder. (They are put there automatically by the SW7 install). See the D7 FAQ for more info.

Q. Does Shockwave 7 support downloadable Xtras?

A. Shockwave 7 does support automatically downloadable Xtras, with the following caveats:

Only Xtras (or packages of multiple Xtras) digitally signed with a Level 3 Certificate from VeriSign can be downloaded automatically. The user can configure their browser to accept all certificates or only ones from certain signers. In the default case, it should definitely prompt the user, but caveat downloader.
Lower-level certificates or those from other signing authorities are not recognized. Xtra packages are usually signed by the Shockwave developer, not the Xtra developer, although some Xtra developers may provide signed packages. The package's URL must be specified with the #package property for that Xtra in the XTRAINFO.TXT file when the Shockwave movie is burned (turned intoa DCR file).
Only Xtras marked by the Xtra developer as "Shockwave Safe" will be recognized by Shockwave 7. This is independent of the download security measure. Xtras that manipulate files outside the allowable folders or perform any system level access should never be marked as "Shockwave Safe". Only an Xtra developer can mark their Xtra as Shockwave Safe. Xtras created prior to the introduction of SW7 will not work with SW7 and the SW7 installer discards such Xtras for this reason.
Once a Shockwave Safe Xtra is installed, it can be used by any Shockwave movie. You should not create a dangerous Xtra and mark it as Shockwave Safe even if your intentions are innocent. Someone else with access to the same Xtra may have malfeasance on their mind. The signer whose digital certificate authenticated the download would presumably be caught and flagellated and Macromedia has reserved the right/ability to lock out certain Xtras that don't play nice (they can do this via their automatic updates of SW7) although whoever created the Xtras and marked it as Shockwave Safe shouldn't have done that.
Shockwave 7 Xtras must reside in one of the folders (Mac vs. Win)

System Folder:Extensions:Macromedia:Shockwave:Xtras

C:\Windows\System\Macromed\Shockwave\Xtras\

Shockwave 6 users must continue to manually download Xtras and place them in their browser support folder.