Mindshare Presenter 1.0

Mindshare Studios, Inc.

User Guide

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http://mindsharesoftware.com


Mindshare Presenter 1.0

© 2006-2007 Mindshare Studios, Inc. All rights reserved.

Adobe® Flash™ and the Adobe Flash Player™ are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. Captionate™ is a registered trademark of the Manitu Group. Riva FLV Encoder™ is a registered trademark of Rothenberger Global Training Solutions. Flix Pro™ is a registered trademark of On2 Technologies.

Visit http://adobe.com, http://www.buraks.com/captionate, http://www.on2.com/consumer/flix-pro/, and http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder  for more information.

All trademarks acknowledged.

User Guide rev. 001

 

END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

 

Important:

Do not use the software accompanying this Agreement (the “Software”) until you have carefully read the following Agreement. Using the Software (or authorizing any other person to do so) indicates your acceptance of the terms and conditions contained in this Agreement. If you do not agree with the terms and conditions of this Agreement, do not use the Software. This Agreement sets forth the terms and conditions for licensing of the Software from Mindshare Studios, Inc. (“Licensor”)

  

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Table of Contents

  1. Getting Started
    1. Introduction
    2. How this Document is Organized
    3. Basic Concepts
  3. About Mindshare Presenter
    1. Features
    2. Interface Tour
  5. Preparing Your Media Assets
    1. Slides
    2. Video and Audio Content
    3. Closed Captions
    4. Documents, Links and Files
    5. Tooltips
  7. Using Mindshare Presenter
    1. Overview
    2. Configuration
    3. Deploying Presenter
    4. Advanced Features
  9. Troubleshooting
    1. Debugging Your Configuration
    2. Support Options

Chapter 1: Getting Started

Introduction

Mindshare Presenter is an easy to deploy, dynamic, Flash-based application that allows web designers, developers, e-learning content providers, and others to deliver compelling, synchronized multimedia presentations online.

Presentations delivered with Mindshare Presenter can be comprised of images, Adobe Flash SWF files, video or audio files, closed captions, as well as documents, web pages or related files (virtually anything you can link to). Mindshare Presenter is a delivery mechanism for your media assets that is easily embedded into any website with simple HTML. No programming skills are required to use Mindshare Presenter; yet it easily integrates with data-driven websites.

Mindshare Presenter takes care of keeping your content in synch, while offering your viewers an attractive, intuitive experience. It is highly customizable: simply by editing two configuration files you can completely change the look and feel of a presentation, add, rearrange or remove content, and enable or disable features of the user interface.

Mindshare Presenter is designed to be flexible enough to attract content producers who want to deliver engaging online material without consulting a one thousand-page Flash manual, as well as professional web developers looking to cut time and cost on projects.

Mindshare Presenter was developed by Mindshare Studios, Inc. with online training, e-learning, product demos, tutorials and corporate presentations in mind; however, its use is not limited to these arenas.

Thank you for purchasing Mindshare Presenter!

How This Document Is Organized

You don’t have to read this document in a linear fashion in order for it to be useful or coherent. However, if you are new to using Flash-based web applications that store configuration data in XML it may benefit you to do so.

Typographic conventions

Text in a monospaced font represents code or example values you might enter into the configuration files.

This user guide is divided into the following chapters:

About Mindshare Presenter — this chapter gives you a brief overview of Mindshare Presenter’s features and its interface.

Preparing Your Media Assets — this chapter provides basic information on creating and gathering the media assets (images, videos, etc.) for a presentation.

Using Mindshare Presenter — this chapter includes detailed information on configuring, installing, and uploading Mindshare Presenter to your server.

Troubleshooting — this chapter details where to get support online and what tools are available to help debug configuration problems.

Basic Concepts

If you attended a presentation in person, you might see a speaker controlling a slideshow with images, videos, graphs or some other media supporting her main points. Mindshare Presenter enables you to provide this experience to viewers online by taking care of combining and synchronizing the various media elements (the speaker, the slideshow, etc.).

A presentation delivered with Mindshare Presenter is comprised of groups of related media assets or elements. Throughout the course of this user guide, the term media group is used to describe one set of related media assets in a presentation. Likewise, the term slide is used to identify the content loaded into the slide area of the Mindshare Presenter interface. A slide can either be a JPG, GIF, SWF, or PNG file. A media group must contain at least one video or audio file (FLV format). A media group will typically consist of an FLV file, a slide (which can be an image or a Flash file), and optionally text captions that displayed in sync with the video. Other assets can be added as well and will be covered in detail later. For more details, see the chapter entitled, Preparing Your Media Assets.

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 A presentation has media groups which are made up of media assets such as slides and videos.

This guide assumes you have a basic understanding of web technology (what servers do, how to upload files, etc). If you need a primer on the basics visit these sources:

You configure Mindshare Presenter using XML (Extensible Markup Language) files. Previous experience with XML is not necessary—all you really need to know is that XML files are plain text files that have specific formatting (similar to HTML). XML uses tags, just like HTML. The term node (or XML node) in XML is essentially equivalent the term tag in HTML.

<tag attribute="attribute 'value'">I'm data in an XML node</tag>

For the purpose of setting up presentations with Mindshare Presenter, simply use the included XML configuration files as examples, modifying them to suit your needs. There are backup templates for all of the XML configuration files used by Mindshare Presenter in the templates directory that was included with your download.

Chapter 2: About Mindshare Presenter

Features

Mindshare Presenter includes the following features and capabilities. Most can be turned on or off through the configuration files as needed (see the chapter Using Mindshare Presenter for details):

Interface Tour

The following images will give you an overview of the Mindshare Presenter graphical user interface.

 Mindshare presenter

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Chapter 3: Preparing Your Media Assets

The following sections will help you create and prepare content for your presentations. If you already have content and just want to set up the software, feel free to jump ahead the next chapter, Using Mindshare Presenter.

Slides

Slides are either static images or Flash SWF files and are displayed alongside your other media assets.

A slide must be one of the following file formats:

In all cases, the best result will be obtained when your slide is sized to 480x360 pixels or less. Mindshare Presenter will load files with larger dimensions but they will overlap other interface elements. There are no other restrictions for slides. Simply export a file in one of the formats listed above and your slide is ready to go.

You can also provide your viewers with a slide detail pop-up as well. This can be the same media asset as you slide or another file entirely. There is no size restriction for slide detail pop-up files. Read more about this feature in the Advanced Features section of chapter 4.

Notes:

If you load an animated GIF, only the first frame is displayed. If animation is necessary for your slide content use a SWF file instead.

Mindshare Presenter runs at 30 frames per second. All loaded SWF files will run at this rate.

Video and Audio Content

Mindshare Presenter supports the FLV (Flash Video) format. You can load audio-only FLVs, video-only FLVs, or standard FLVs with both video and audio. Your FLV files can be encoded with any encoding parameters (frame rate, bit rate, etc.) you choose.

All other encoding parameters aside, the best result will be obtained when your FLV is sized to exactly 240x180 pixels. If your videos are larger or smaller than this size Mindshare presenter will automatically scale them to fit within the video window.

Notes:

Mindshare Presenter’s video window has a 4:3 aspect ratio. Loaded FLVs will scale to fit the player.

FLVs are delivered via progressive download.

A detailed introduction to encoding video is beyond the scope of this document. However, you can get started encoding FLV files for free using the Riva FLV Encoder. On2 Technologies also offers a very high quality FLV encoder called Flix Pro. A good introduction to encoding Flash video by Kevin Towes is available on the Adobe website.

Closed Captions

Mindshare Presenter allows you to add closed captions in two ways. You can also easily disable captions altogether (see Configuration in the next chapter).

Method 1: Adding Captions Manually Using XML

You can add captions to your presentation using XML files that you associate to specific videos in the media playlist by adding a caption attribute to a mediagroup node (more about the media playlist in the next chapter).

You can create as many caption XML files as you need and save them in the directory you specify through the application settings XML file. By default this is the same directory as the FLV files. A sample caption XML file is in the XML templates directory (there are several others in the demo presentation included with your purchase as well).

To add captions, specify the caption text that you want to display and the video time (in seconds) when you want to display it. You can clear the currently displayed caption by leaving the caption text blank; this is useful if there is a long pause in the audio track of the video. For each caption, copy the caption XML node and its child nodes (speaker, tracks, track0) and fill in the desired caption time and text. Leave the speaker node set to -1. The caption text node is the node labeled track0 (see below).

Your caption XML files must follow this format:

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 Use the included captions.xml template file in the templates directory as a starting point.

Method 2: Embedding Captions with Captionate

Captionate is great little program that automates the somewhat tedious task of captioning Flash video. Captionate can embed caption data directly into your FLV files or export caption data as XML (ready to go for Mindshare Presenter). The data is then displayed to the user at the appropriate time during playback in the caption display area.

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 Captions displayed during playback.

Mindshare Presenter supports the Captionate XML format so your presentation will work whether the data is embedded in the FLV or included via an XML file. Embedding caption data can simplify file management because you only have one FLV file for each video clip rather than having both an FLV and an XML file per clip. However, if you are delivering video for multiple bandwidths (i.e. encoding high-, medium-, and low-bandwidth versions of each FLV) it is to your advantage to use XML instead of embedding your caption data. That way if you need to make a change to your caption text you can simply update the single XML file and leave the three FLVs alone.

For more information or to purchase Captionate, visit http://www.buraks.com/captionate/

Using HTML to Format Caption Text

You can use the following HTML tags in to format the text in your captions:

The Anchor Tag—the <a> tag creates a hypertext link and supports the following attributes: href, target. Example:

<a href='http://mindsharestudios.com' target='_blank'>mindshare</a>

The Bold Tag—the <b> tag renders bold text. Example:

I just <b>love</b> writing help files!

The Break Tag—the <br> tag creates a line break. Example:

Let's make a new line<br>right here.

The Font Tag—the <font> tag specifies a font for the text and supports the following attributes: color, face, size. Example:

<font face='Times New Roman' size='24' color='#0000FF'>This text is 16-point blue Times New Roman.</font>

The Italic Tag—the <i> tag displays the text in italics. Example:

But why am I emphasizing <i>this?</i>

The Underline Tag—the <u> tag creates underlined text. Example:

This is <u>underlined</u> text.

If you use HTML tags in your caption text, you must replace all special characters (like the < and >) in the XML document with character entities or enclose them within CDATA block (examples below) otherwise they will be interpreted as XML nodes, not HTML formatting. If you are using Captionate you don’t have to worry about this as the program will take care of it for you.

An anchor tag with character entities:

&lt;a href='http://google.com'&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt;

Enclosing the same anchor tag inside a CDATA block will have the same effect and is much easier to read (CDATA block is highlighted in blue for clarity):


<![CDATA[<a href='http://google.com'>Google</a>]]>

Notes:

For a list a character entities see this online reference. A CDATA (Character Data) block signals to the XML parser that the contents of the block should not be interpreted as XML.

You can mix and match captioning methods within one presentation. For example, one media group might have a FLV with embedded captions and the next could use an XML file to supply captions data which is added at runtime.

Mindshare Studios Inc. is not affiliated with the Manitu Group (Captionate’s publisher)—it’s simply the best utility for captioning web video that we’ve found, so building support for it made sense.

Documents, Links and Files

Mindshare Presenter lets you add links to external web pages, PDF documents, or other files. See the next chapter, Using Mindshare Presenter, for specific details. Links to these resources will appear at the bottom of the main navigation menu after the media groups in your playlist.

Tooltips

The term tooltip refers to a small box with supplementary information that appears when a user clicks on a highlighted word or phrase in the caption display.

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 A tooltip.

There are two steps to creating tooltips  in your captions. The first step is to add a special anchor tag to the caption text at the position where you want the tooltip to appear using the following prototype (for more about anchor tags see the Using HTML to Format Caption Text):

<a href='asfunction:define,tooltipID'>click text</a>

Another example (with a yellow font color applied):

<a href='asfunction:define,Cool'><font color='#FFCC00'>cTooltip for the word cool.</font></a>

This anchor tag is entered either in a captions XML file or directly into you FLV using Captionate, for more information see, Closed Captions above.

Second, you must create an XML document named tooltips.xml in the captions directory (the captions directory is covered in the Configuration section of the following chapter). The tooltips.xml file contains the data to display for each caption (the tooltip text and tooltip ID). The tooltip ID that you set in the XML file is referenced in the anchor tag (tooltip ID’s are displayed in a bold typeface followed by a colon above the tooltip text).

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 The tooltips.xml file.

Notes:

Tooltips were added as a means to offer users definitions for technical terms or abstruse vocabulary inline with the presentation.

Chapter 4: Using Mindshare Presenter

Overview

This chapter contains detailed information on configuring Mindshare Presenter before deployment to your server.

Mindshare Presenter is made up of the following files and directories:

§         documents—the default PDFDIRECTORY

§         slides—the default SWFDIRECTORY

§         videos—the default VIDDIRECTORY and CAPTIONDIRECTORY

Configuration

Most Mindshare Presenter configuration options are contained in several XML files. This section will walk you through each file and the options contained therein.

The Application Settings File

The Mindshare Presenter application settings file is named settings.xml and is located in the settings directory. This file controls the overall set up of the software. The settings file is split up into three parts: visual settings, content settings, path settings, and application settings.

The visual settings control the look and feel of the user interface. Using these settings you can “skin” the Mindshare Presenter interface to match your website or corporate style guide. It is a good idea to experiment with these settings to get a better idea of what they do.


VISUAL SETTINGS


Possible Values


Description

interfaceStyle

default, transparent or any hexadecimal color value  (e.g. #FFCC00)

sets the overall look of the user interface (transparent removes the interface background elements)

themeColor

any hexadecimal color value

sets the color of several elements of the user interface

textRollOverColor

any hexadecimal color value

sets the text color of menu items when the user move's their mouse over them

textSelectedColor

any hexadecimal color value

sets the text color of the selected item in the menu

selectionColor

any hexadecimal color value

sets the background color of the selected item in the menu

disabledColor

any hexadecimal color value

sets the color for disabled user interface elements

menuColors

any two hexadecimal color values (#95B2C8,#ffffff)

sets the background color of items in the menu

The content settings control several aspects of the presentation’s display. The “print version” settings do not have to be used for the purpose of providing alternative printable content; they can link to any URL or be left blank.


CONTENT SETTINGS


Possible Values


Description

TITLE

any text value

the title for the presentation

DISPLAYCAPTIONS

true or false

if false, completely removes the closed caption display area from the presentation

PRINTVERSIONTXT

any text value

text to display in the upper right of the interface

PRINTVERSIONURL

any valid URL

link associated with the PRINTVERSIONTXT text

The path settings determine where Mindshare Presenter looks for your content. All directory paths are relative to the HTML page that the file presenter.swf is embedded, by default this is presenter.html. Your path settings can have the same values (i.e. you could set all your paths to the same directory). If you change the default directories you may want to create index pages to block users from browsing (and downloading you media assets) or configure your server to do this automatically.


PATH SETTINGS


Possible Values


Description

CAPTIONDIRECTORY

a relative file path

the directory to look for video caption XML files

SWFDIRECTORY

a relative file path

the directory to look for slide content (JPG, GIF, PNG, SWF files)

VIDDIRECTORY

a relative file path

the directory to look for Flash video/audio (FLV) files

PDFDIRECTORY

a relative file path

the directory to look for documents

The application settings change Mindshare Presenter’s behavior (playback).


APPLICATION SETTINGS


Possible Values


Description

AUTOSTART

true or false

should the presentation start automatically

STARTVOLUME

0 - 100

sets the initial volume for the presentation

STARTSLIDE

a number representing the media group to begin playback from

specifies which media group to start the presentation on, default is 1

DETECTBANDWIDTH

true or false

enables bandwidth detection* (see note on using this feature below)

BUFFERLENGTH

any number

time in seconds to buffer the video, default is 1

DEBUG

true or false

enables the built-in diagnostic console for debugging

VERBOSE

true or false

used in conjunction with DEBUG, if true outputs more detailed troubleshooting information

The Media Playlist file

The Mindshare Presenter media playlist file is named playlist.xml and is found in the settings directory. This file contains all the information relating to your presentation’s media assets. This file is where you organize and group all of your content and set various display options for each media group. You can re-order the playlist by re-arranging the XML nodes. The order of the attributes inside a node does not matter (e.g. label can come before or after icon, or vice versa). However, link nodes must come after the mediagroup nodes in the playlist. Both link and mediagroup nodes must be wrapped within section nodes.

The playlist file is made up of section, mediagroup, and link nodes. Below is a detailed description of how to use each type of node.

Section Nodes

A section node allows you to group mediagroup nodes into sections or categories.

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 A section node wrapped around two mediagroup nodes.

This table shows the possible attributes for section nodes and their function:


ATTRIBUTE NAME


Possible Values


Description

label

any text value (e.g. My Rad Video)

Sets the section name on the presentation menu

icon

no_icon, default_icon, print_icon, url_icon

sets which icon to show next to the section label (images of the icons are in the Interface Tour)

Mediagroup Nodes

A mediagroup node represents one set of related media assets.

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 An example media group node.

This table shows the possible attributes for mediagroup nodes and their function:


ATTRIBUTE NAME


Possible Values


Description

label

any text value (e.g. My Cool Video Segment)

a text label to describe the media group

video

an FLV filename (e.g. myCoolVideo.flv)

filename of the Flash video file to load. This file must be in the VIDDIRECTORY

slide

a filename (e.g. mySlide.swf or mySlide.jpg)

filename of the content to load into the slide area. This file must be in the SWFDIRECTORY

bgcolor (OPTIONAL)

any HEX color value (e.g. #FFCC00)

changes the background color of the interface (see note on using this feature below)

caption (OPTIONAL)

a filename (e.g. captions.xml)

filename of the XML file that contains the closed caption data for the media group. File must be in the CAPTIONDIRECTORY

hidevideo (OPTIONAL)

true or false

hides the video window, useful if you are using audio-only FLV files

stop (OPTIONAL)

true, false or delay

sets a flag to pause the presentation at the end of the current video instead of continuing on the next media group. entering delay forces a 10-second delay

popup (OPTIONAL)

any valid URL

URL for slide pop-up button (e.g. larger version of the current slide, see note on using this feature below)

Link Nodes

Link nodes allow you to include documents or other files at the end of your presentation. Link nodes have four supported attributes: label, pdf, file, and url. You must choose either pdf, file, or url for each link node (i.e. only one per node). A link node cannot be both a PDF and another file or URL at the same time.

This table shows the possible attributes for link nodes and their function:


ATTRIBUTE NAME


Possible Values


Description

label

any text value (e.g. My Rad Video)

sets the name on the presentation menu

pdf

a filename or absolute URL (e.g. myDoc.pdf or http://site.com/doc.pdf)

a filename of a PDF document to link to. Unless the URL begins with http Mindshare Presenter will assume the file is in the PDFDIRECTORY.

url

any valid URL

the URL for a web page to open

file

any valid URL

the URL of any file to open. Unless the URL begins with http Mindshare Presenter will assume the file is in the PDFDIRECTORY.

Notes:

You further configure your presentation using caption XML files and/or a tooltip XML file. These files and their use are described in the previous chapter. They are not described here because they contain presentation content rather than settings or configuration options.

Deploying Mindshare Presenter

Once you have created your media assets, configured your presentation and tested it locally in your web browser, you are ready to deploy Mindshare Presenter to your production environment.

Deployment involves uploading the Mindshare Presenter directory (with its subdirectories and files) to your web server. Mindshare Presenter doesn’t have any special server hardware or software requirements, but keep in mind that delivering multimedia content can be bandwidth and resource intensive. No further configuration is necessary.

Your end users computer systems should meet the minimum requirements set forth by Adobe for its Flash Player. Mindshare Presenter will work with Flash Player 8 and above. Also keep in mind that unless you have taken the steps necessary to delivery different version of your presentation for multiple bandwidths, your users’ internet connection speed may affect their presentation experience.

Notes:

If you changed the default directories you may want to create index pages to block users from browsing (and downloading you media assets directly).

Advanced Features

Mindshare Presenter has a few more useful features not documented elsewhere.

Dynamically set the paths to the settings and media playlist XML files

You can modify the code used to embed Mindshare Presenter into your web page to dynamically change the settings XML and/or media playlist XML filenames and paths. Utilizing this feature allows the integration of Mindshare Presenter with dynamic data from a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP.

To dynamically set the paths to the settings and/or media playlist files change the following lines of code in the presenter.html file to the appropriate path:

// --- SET SETTINGS AND/OR MEDIA PLAYLIST DIRECTORY -------------------so.addVariable("MEDIAXML","settings/playlist.xml");

so.addVariable("SETTINGSXML","settings/settings.xml");

Change the preloader colors

You have the ability to set the preloader (the loading bar that displays when the application loads) to use any color scheme you choose.

To do this, change the following lines of code in the presenter.html file by replacing the current hexadecimal color values with your own:

// --- SET SET PRELOADER COLORS -------------------

so.addVariable("BAR_COLOR","0x59FF59");

so.addVariable("BORDER_COLOR","0xFFFFFF");

Using the slide pop-up feature

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The slide pop-up feature allows you to supply users with a larger version of the current slide. To enable this (on a per media group basis) add a popup attribute with a URL value to the desired mediagroup node in the media playlist XML file. If the URL does not begin with http, Mindshare Presenter assumes the file is relative to presenter.swf’s container page (presenter.html by default). The pop-up window is automatically resized to fit your image file’s dimensions and centered on the user’s monitor.

Using the popup attribute in a media group:

<mediagroup label="My Video" popup="../pics/slide01.jpg" video="myfile.flv" slide="slide.jpg" />

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 A slide detail pop-up window.

Overriding interface color per media group

You can change the background color of the Mindshare Presenter interface at runtime on a per media group basis during playback by setting the bgcolor attribute of a mediagroup node in the playlist XML file.

Using the bgcolor attribute in a media group:

<mediagroup label="My Video" bgcolor="FFCC00" video="myfile.flv" slide="slide.jpg" />

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This overrides any value that you set for interfaceStyle in the settings XML file. The new background color will remain set for all media groups until Mindshare Presenter gets to another media group node with the bgcolor attribute explicitly set.

User bandwidth detection

If you turn on the bandwidth detection feature Mindshare Presenter will automatically record your users’ connection speed and attempt to deliver the most appropriate FLV content. In order for this feature to work you have to encode three versions of each FLV file in your presentation for high, medium, and low bandwidth users and name them according to the naming convention listed below. This is because when DETECTBANDWIDTH is set to true Mindshare Presenter will attempt to load the current video with a special prefix in front of the file name (see below).

The files must follow this naming convention:

low_FILENAME.flv

medium_FILENAME.flv

high_FILENAME.flv

(FILNAME can be whatever you want.)

The XML media group node will still look like this (no bandwidth prefix):

<mediagroup label="My Video" video="myfile.flv" slide="slide.jpg" />

Notes:

If you are authoring Flash SWF files to load as slides you can access the users’ bandwidth programmatically through the following variables: _root.bandwidth, a string (either high, medium or low) and _root.KBps, a number representing the detected Kilobits per second.

Chapter 5: Troubleshooting

Debugging Your Configuration

In addition to the basic error messages (pictured below) that you may receive if there is problem with your configuration, Mindshare Presenter also includes a built-in, onscreen debugger. The debugger outputs information to help you identify where you may have a problem in you configuration files.

help image

 A standard onscreen error.

help image

 The debugging output console.

To enable the debugger set DEBUG in the settings XML file to true. If you would like even more information from the debugger enable verbose mode by setting VERBOSE to true as well. Turn debugging off by setting these values to false when you’re done.

Support

Discuss your project and get free Mindshare Studios (as well as user-to-user) support on the support forum. You can access the Mindshare Software support forum 24 hours a day at http://mindsharesoftware.com/support/ .

If you find any errors or omissions in this documentation, have feature requests, or feedback let us know. Whenever humanly possible, any reproducible bug will be addressed within 48 hours.