It's not as inaccessible as I first thought.
The screen is divided into zones, some are vertically arranged, some
are horizontal, almost tabular.
From top to bottom, there's a big "Register new serial number" button
just under the title bar, then PM shows you the products you own,
what's downloaded or needs to be, what's installed or needs to be,
what's authorized or needs to be, and what's updated or needs to be.
Below this strip is a window showing what, if anything, can be deleted
from the downloads area. Several of all of the above-mentioned
elements also have a "Details" button that will display more specific
information about a product or function, like exactly what can be
deleted from the downloads area.
You can use the register button to add serial numbers to your
Toontrack account, or you can do it online through their very
accessible Web portal. Log into your account, then after the whole
Product Manager push thing, you'll find a link (whose name I forget at
the moment but when you hear it, you'll know you've found it. Activate
that link and you'll be able to add a new serial number in the normal
Web form manner. Then it will appear in your local Product Manager.
The most important Product Manager window zone is the one in the
middle, where downloaded, installed, authorized, or updated products
appear. Each product is divided into four phases: (1) Download, (2)
install, (3) authorize, and (4) update. Above each product that
requires action is a number corresponding to these four phases. The
words for these actions are written just below the numbers. They're
all in this funky gray color, but the ones that actually need acting
on are in a different shade of gray. These are the things you must
click on in order to make things happen. Hindsight makes me think that
clicking on the numbers would work, too, because the numbers go away
after the associated phase completes.
For each product, a separate "Sound Installer" is launched. You don't
need the PM to launch these; instead, you can launch them manually by
finding them on your computer's associated product folder in the
Toontrack downloads area. Don't be fooled, though, by the fact that
there are two copies of this program, one in the open, the other
inside a ZIP archive. If you run the one in the ZIP archive, it will
tell you to insert the product disk into your CD/DVD reader, but if
you run the standalone one located in the product folder as described
above, it will work.
On each "Sound Installer" there is a welcome screen displaying the
product name on the left and some action buttons on the right. The
ones I have always seen are "Install" and "Modify". I suspect if I ran
the "Sound Installer" again, I would find a "Remove" or "Uninstall"
button as well.
Now, about these buttons. They're technically not buttons. They're not
even standard Windows controls, and in fact, if you click on any of
them, nothing will happen! That's where the madness lies. Calling upon
my internal knowledgebase of weird stuff I've seen in the past, I
tried an old technique of moving the mouse cursor just to the left of
the word on which I wanted to click, pressing the click-the-mouse
button, and bingo, success! That means that the hotspot which responds
to the click is not correctly aligned with the word on- the screen, or
there's a picture to the left of the action word on which a seeing
person would be clicking. Think of it like a vending machine, where
the names of what the machine vends are in little plastic windows next
to the actual buttons, but you don't press the plastic window, you
press the big button.
One you get the install going, the rest is very accessible via the
JAWS Cursor. The opening screen has a checkbox to accept the EULA, and
there is a screen that asks you about options for the thing you're
installing, which may include things like plugin choices, 32- or
64-bit versions thereof, location of files, size of library, etc., all
very readable via the JAWS Cursor, but not accessible with the TAB
key.
At the bottom of each screen, lower left corner, is the "Continue"
button. So far, in the five components I've installed, clicking on the
word does the job, unlike the product action buttons mentioned above.
HTH somebody.
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