Rosetta Xtra v1.0.7 for Windows		January 2,.2005

The Rosetta xtra is a multi-media scripting xtra for Macromedia Director and Authorware developers. Rosetta is designed to add a broad range of support for additional media types not natively supported by Director or Authorware. These media types include many of today's most popular software on the market. The goal is to help you integrate your Director product with other applications quickly and seamlessly. Some of Rosetta Xtra's features include:

• Control, create, extract and print Microsoft PowerPoint files. (PPT, PPS, POT)
• Control, create, extract, and print Microsoft Excel sheets and charts. (XLS)
• Create and extract zip compatible files (ZIP)
• Read and write binary and plain text files.
• Read and write to Windows Registry (and INI files )
• Read and write popular image formats (BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, ICO, PCX, TGA, WMF, J2K, PDF)
• Capture images from Director's internal stage buffer, off screen buffer, clipboard, or Windows.
• Print high resolution images, unicode RTF.
• Image filtering, read image EXIF data
• Read and write data from popular database formats (SQL Server, MySQL, Access, Excel, dBASE, Oracle..and more)
• Encrypt and decrypt files using AES encryption algorithm
• Create RSA MD5 checksum and CRC32 checksum on strings and files
• Base 64 encoding and decoding

The goal of the Rosetta is to provide developers the ease of product integration. By combining popular features and media types, there is less of a need for developers to evaluate, learn, purchase and distribute many xtras from various vendors. The learning curve for the developer is also reduced because many functions in Rosetta share the same fundamentals. Even if you don't need all the functions of Rosetta today, the 200+ functions help you prepare for all future projects.

[ More info on Rosetta Xtra ]

Data Linker Xtra v1.2 for Windows		November.9.2003

Data Linker Xtra provides Director developers the power and ease of integrating databases into their products. Data Linker have a complete set of features that helps developers create database applications quickly and painlessly. Data Linker can connect to many data sources including Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, dBASE, Oracle and many others.

Developers will enjoy the syntax that allows them to reuse their existing code for new projects, even when you choose a new database technology. In addition, there's no need to learn about database programming techniques such as opening a recordset, setting cursor types, or obtaining schema information, because everything is encapsulated for the lingo developer.

Use Data Linker Xtra to::

• Use SQL to query and/or update database records from lingo
• Use the same methods to retrieve data from any ODBC compliant data provider
• Obtain a list of tables/spreadsheets
• Obtain a list of fields names
• Create new records in your existing data file
• Read field attributes
• Obtain connection properties
• Obtain the record count before querying the actual data

(NEW) Version 1.2 has fixed several issues and a new licensing agreement that brings an end to the existing cumbersome licensing gimmicks that confused many users.

PowerPoint Import Xtra (FREE)		August.15.2004

The Calu PowerPoint Import xtra is tools xtra designed to replace the PowerPoint Import xtra provided by Macromedia. Macromedia provided an xtra that will only work with PowerPoint 4 file format. The Calu PowerPoint Import xtra can work with any version of PowerPoint file, including files saved under Microsoft PowerPoint 2003.

MD5 Hashing Xtra v1.1 (FREE)		May.17.2004

The MD5 Hashing Xtra is a cross platform xtra for Macromedia Director. It provides developers the ability to hash files and messages using the RSA MD5 message digest algorithm. This provides developers a tool to convert a file of variable length into a handy 128 bit string reference. By changing a single character in the same source file will produce a completely different 128 bit string reference.

I've started writing this xtra on a project where I needed to authenticate files on a hard drive. There was a need to check for file tampering and there was no xtra that had similar abilities. Using file date and/or file size was not adequate. Messing with dates on a Windows platform means messing with time zones, and actual file sizes are tied to the user's file allocation table and cluster size. MD5 hashing is much more dependable than CRC32. CRC is a quicker file checksum algorithm, however its accuracies is not as dependable compared to MD5.

(NEW) Version 1.1 is now Windows and Macintosh compatible.

The complete source code to MD5 Hashing Xtra's version 1.0 is available for download as well. The source code is completely free to download, use, edit, and/or distribute.