For starters, a note on the buttons' behavior. You might have noticed it quite soon that the buttons' reaction to your clicks is not really instant. Sometimes you will see the button reacts to the click visually, but the action happens a few moments later. Sometimes the action doesn't happen at all, so you'll have to repeat clicking. Sometimes (hopefully, I minimized this possibility to a minimum) it can lead even to the program's crash. This is due to many technical reasons coming from the fact that the show was developed using the Macromedia Director runtime environment, which is not optimized for many, even traditional, interactive tasks, and might be slightly 'buggy' when running this complicated application under Windows. Try to be a bit patient and cautious with the button clicks, - that's the only advise I have for you at the moment, I am sorry.

For similar reasons, not everything is stable with the transitions that are incorporated into the show 'en masse'. While the internal transitions of all kinds that happen inside of every clip, whether a LivingPiciture clip or an animation one, are stable enough, those soft horizontal wipes which allow the new coming clip to nicely replace the current one, can fail to function for some obscure reason. Instead of a soft horizontal wipe-like transition, you will see the new clip's image suddenly 'jumps' on the screen (sometimes preceded by a momentary black window), and that behavior can hold for unknown number of the next coming clips, until you click on one of the show's navigation buttons, or until the show software miraculously restores the normal soft transitions by itself. In any case, there is no clear explanation as to why it happens (or why it does not) and how to help the transitions to happen in a more stable manner. I just hope this will be enhanced in the next version of the Director program and, subsequently, of the SynthArt CD-ROM.

However, what can be said with a certainty about the show in general and its transitions in particular, is that it will run much more stable if there are no other simultaneously running tasks in the system, while SynthArt is doing its magic. If you like to entertain yourself with this art show while running some mundane system housekeeping tasks in the background (like backups, hard disk defragmenting, MP3 compression, whatever else), it's surely possible to do in such advanced multitasking system as the Windows OS is, but in that case, you shouldn't be surprised that the show will stop performing all those soft cross-slide transitions. Another thing to warn you about: all the Director-based multimedia shows, by their nature, will want to use all 100% of your processor's time, and that might pose some difficulties for the other system tasks you want to perform simultaneously with the Synth Art show.

On some PC systems that I've seen (notably those fresh Windows ME and XP ones with only Windows Media Player 7/8 installed), the configuration of the video subsystem can result in strange or erroneous playback of small animation clips superimposed over full-screen backgrounds in a number of SynthArt shows. These clips are supposed to be seamlessly blended in the screen's graphics, but some faulty 'feature' of the video card driver's support for Windows DirectDraw subsystem might 'betray' such elements of the animation show and display them shifted slightly from their dedicated screen position or make them visibly darker or lighter than the underlying graphics, or otherwise disturb that so finely-tuned seamless visual effect of which SynthArt is so rich and characteristic.

A few words on the "Fractal Panoramas World" show. Firstly, I should emphasize here, again, the necessity to install the QuickTime 4 video subsystem from the SynthArt CD explicitly. If you don't do it (and haven't installed it some other way, like by downloading from the Web) and still try to start the "Fractal Panoramas World" part, most likely, you will see the message "Wait until the QuickTimePlayer arrives and becomes maximized" displayed at the bottom, but nothing happening on your screen, or, in the best case, a dull message displayed by Windows Media Player: "Unable to download an appropriate decompressor" and next, the Player's window with some strange graphical contents.

Secondly, even if your system is configured just fine, with the QT4 installed and everything, you still can get an impression that the show is not working properly. It's worth noting that the proper implementation of this part of the product, so as to make these very large Apple's QTVR movies integrated and running smoothly within the SynthArt's and Multimedia Director's environment, was extraordinary tricky thing to do, and even required programming of a special small "helper" application. When started from within SynthArt, it does work rather well, but the startup process (after you click on the "star" button to launch the Panoramas) can be slow, so you should be - again - patient and try to wait a little. Or, it may even fail to emerge on the screen, under some circumstances and on some systems. If you don't see the QTVR player and its 'movie' window starting up (only the opening Fractal Panoramas World screen is shown), then you should try to quit SynthArt altogether and restart it again; please also try not to click within the opening window, until you see the QTVR 'movie' and the corresponding prompt message at the bottom. Or, if the QTVR windows show up, but the panorama's movie window is not maximized, please help it with clicking on the 'Maximize' button (the one between the '_' and 'X' buttons in the movie window's top right corner), - this is the intended way to display the Fractal Panoramas in all their glory. Hopefully, these few imperfections in SynthArt will be corrected in the next version of the CD-ROM.

Thirdly (and very sadly), - as the last-minute test showed, the newest release 5 of QuickTime Player from Apple has its internal and external design significantly changed. The Player's window (the default 'skin') is now so 'bulky' that it won't fit in the screen space dedicated for it in the "Fractal Panoramas World" show, so I failed to adjust it accordingly in any reasonable and controlled way (QTPlayer seems to have internal API-related problems regarding the window's maximizing as well). I've contacted the Apple support people on this issue, but they didn't address it so far. I really can't give any advise for those who have already installed QT5 on their machine and try to play the QTVR movie from within the SynthArt CD-ROM; the only way to run it seems to be a manual (double-click the FPWorld.mov file on the disk under Windows Explorer) launch of the panorama file, - and then you are on your own with it...

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