Distributing your piece

After you have completed your Authorware piece, you will need to package it in a format that can be used by the audience who will be running it.

You can distribute your work in several ways: on disk, on CD, over a network, or on the web. Authorware needs only to see an accessible disk; it makes no distinction between a local hard drive, a removable disk, or a network server.

Before you start to author your work, you need to decide which distribution medium to use--disk, CD, or network (intranet or Internet)--and where to include the runtime application. The choice will depend on the size of your files, the types of computers the piece will be played on, and the terms of your Authorware License Agreement.

The point of creating pieces is to distribute them. When you distribute an Authorware piece, you provide users with a packaged or web-packaged piece--a separate version that users can run but not edit.

Always design for the least capable system your piece will run on. If you've designed your piece with 16-bit sound, it won't be of much use to someone with an 8-bit sound card.

Here are just some of the requirements you should consider:

Which operating systems will the piece be delivered on?
What are the size and color capability of users' monitors?
How much RAM and hard disk space do they have?
Are there any other hardware requirements, such as sound cards for Windows computers or CD drives?
Do you need to provide installation instructions, Read Me files, or an installer program?
If you're delivering over a network, which web browsers and specific browser plug-ins, such as Macromedia Authorware Web Player and ActiveX, will your audience need?

If your piece contains libraries, you'll need to set the library search path for each distributed piece so that Authorware knows where to look for the libraries (see Packaging a library).

Distributing your piece

See also