This month ... the lion eats tonight.

This time around, let's work through an example to show the concept of a "drop-off" button.  This type of button differs dramatically from other buttons.  Normally, a button is activated by the user moving the cursor over the button and clicking on the left mouse button.  Not a radical concept.   Computers have been doing that for years.  Buttons can be objects, or even invisible.  A drop-off button, however, only works when you drop a graphic object on the button!  To illustrate this, we're going to feed a lion a banana.  A ridiculous example, I know, but it does let me use clipart that comes on the Hyperstudio CD-ROM.

Let's start by painting some scenery.  Draw a horizon and fill below the horizon with the grass texture and above the horizon clouds on a blue sky.

Let's lasso the lion from the ANIMALS.BMP clipart and place it on your card.  And, from the DINGBAT2.BMP clipart, lasso the banana.  When we're all done, we have to be able to pick up the banana and move it around, so click on the FEATURES button and make the banana draggable.

We're just about there.  Next, ADD A BUTTON, and choose the invisible button.  As well, click the FEATURES button and make the button DROP OFF ONLY.  You're going to position this invisible button over the lion's mouth.

When you're asked for ACTIONS, it makes sense to play a sound and there's a nice lion growl in the sound library.  In the zoo environment this scene takes place, I also figured that there just might be a bird sitting on the ground that would take flight when the lion growled.  Finally, it makes sense that we move to the next card to show a happily fed lion...

Change to the Browse tool and try clicking on the button.  It doesn't work!  That's because it's not your traditional "click on me" button.  However, move your mouse over top of the banana, hold down the left mouse button and drop it on the lion's mouth (where the button is) and watch the show.

OK, it makes more sense that we use the gorilla from the original clipart for this example.  But then, I couldn't have used the lion sound effect!  Other than this silly example, consider the ways that this drop off feature can be used to make your stacks even more interactive.  You could pick up a key and unlock a door; you could design a stack where the user has to match one part of an object to another; you could piece together a broken image; ...

The possibilities are endless.