If life actually came with a soundtrack, we here at LAUNCH would have been painting a very specific musical landscape these last few months. It's been an action-packed era in our music and multimedia universe, as we've continued to develop our LAUNCH CD-ROM and the new-and-improved LAUNCH Online.
The tune "Changes" by rock legend David Bowie would be an appropriate song to kick off our LAUNCH soundtrack, because anyone who's been a regular visitor to LAUNCH will have undoubtedly noticed some major construction work within our City limits. We have undertaken some massive interior and exterior renovations that we hope you'll appreciate.
In keeping with the construction theme, we would then segue into Track 2, a live, exclusive version of Sarah McLachlan's ΓÇ£Building a Mystery,ΓÇ¥ which appeared in LAUNCH #14.
Although we have made alterations to the LAUNCH City over the last two-and-a-half years, this issueΓÇÖs facelift brings a fresh new look to the entire environment. We wanted to make the City a true three-dimensional space while keeping the key content buildings (The Hang, Temple of Twitch, Reactor Room, LAUNCH Cinema and BinkyΓÇÖs). It has been a tremendous effort by our art department and they are not completely finished yet. But we felt it was better to give you a 95% new City than keep the old one for another issue.
The good news is that because we are still making changes, we really want your immediate feedback. Tell us what you love or hate about the new look, as well as what we should add. We will take all your suggestions to heart as we finish the new City for LAUNCH #16. When the exterior facade is finished, we will continue our interior redesign with the Reactor Room as our highest priority. It is the only area to be basically unchanged since LAUNCH bowed.
The Jars Of Clay song ΓÇ£Crazy TimesΓÇ¥ would be an appropriate follow-up tune at this time, because if building a new City wasnΓÇÖt enough to keep us from dodging the dangerous rays of So Cal sunshine, rewriting the software code that underpins everything in LAUNCH certainly didnΓÇÖt help the old tan lines. The engineering team (or ΓÇ£tech dudesΓÇ¥ as they are commonly referred to) has been working in parallel for the last six months to switch the LAUNCH authoring tool to Macromedia Director from Apple Media Tool. We have always been able to play Director applications within LAUNCH but you often saw those ΓÇ£loadingΓÇ¥ screens come up while the application opened up a Director file. With everything now in Director, those loading screens will be as rare as platinum albums from Poison.
Director has also allowed us to banish the pesky spinning globe that meant you had to wait as you moved to different buildings. The downside is a bit more of a wait time to start LAUNCH and some slightly higher system requirements. If you are having problems with this issue and you have never had problems before, please let us know by e-mailing our tech dudes (support@2launch.com). We think this new authoring system will provide a lot of benefits but it may cause a few hiccups in the short term.
At this point in our soundtrack sequence, we'd get involved in a little legal wrangling because we'd need to license the entire content of Oasis's album Be Here Now, the title of which expresses our sentiments regarding the October debut of the new LAUNCH Online. The site has been an incredibly huge undertaking and will be on par with the disc in terms of ongoing effort. We know that you will like it. We will be adding more disc-web connectivity in the near future to take advantage of the tremendous music content and community that we have built online.
And finally, as we note the passing into the darkness of a CD-ROM periodical named for a humble kitchen appliance, we grab that lost shaker of salt, indulge in a mixture of true remorse and competitive delight, and kick up the volume on that damn Jimmy Buffett classic, ΓÇ£Margaritaville.ΓÇ¥ Now who's got the blender?
