Even as fun as it is to learn and use, the whole delicious iShell enchilada tends to leave a touch of the acid reflux when it comes time to create your final CD-ready project. Unlike Director, which packages runtime files up into neat little projectors and protected casts and Shockwave files, getting all the junk together that iShell needs to present self-contained projects away from the cozy nest of your development box is a slightly messier process. While I'm not going to go into tremendous detail about general iShell runtime prep in this tutorial (the iShell Launcher documentation does a fine enough job of walking you through it), I am going to pass along a trick for using the iShell Launcher's QuickTime "sniffer" for purposes other than for which it was originally designed.

While Tribeworks' iShell 3 is a pretty gawrsh-durned excellent multimedia authoring program, chances are that you're not going to be able to head on down to your local Mega-Giganto Book Emporium And International House of Double-Caffeinated-Half-Caff-Lattes and find any supplemental iShell training books. At the same time, said establishment probably has devoted more square footage than most of us live in just to books on Director alone. However, author Jan Costenbader of Electric Tours has stepped up to provide two iShell resources that could very well be all the extra iShell reference most of us may ever need. Which is a good thing, since iShell 3 In Depth and iShell 3 Illustrated pretty much make up the entire market.

I've gotten a lot of feedback on my somewhat recent commentary, entitled "The Accidental Switcher," in which I lamented how the relative slowness of Flash MX authoring and playback in Mac OS X led me to use Windows more and more for Flash development (and, by extension, most everything else). But I do realize that my solution isn't for everyone; indeed, prying it out of your cold, dead hands is the only thing that will separate many of you from your Mac. With that as the case, I now humbly offer several tips I've found to make the OS X Flash experience a little less painful.