A movie in a window is any Director movie playing inside an independent operating-system level window (*** Windows? is it at OS level or is it a child of the Director app? ***). MIAWs have a number of behavioural differences from a normal Director movie, especially when running within the Director application rather than a projector, but almost all features of a movie apply to a MIAW.
The most significant difference between a MIAW and the stage movie is that all the Director windows (cast, score, script etc) belong to the stage -- it is not possible to directly edit the contents of a MIAW. The MIAW is always in "playing" mode rather than "editing" mode. A MIAW automatically starts playing as soon as it is opened.
MIAWs can communicate with the stage and each other via global variables (all globals are visible to all movies) and with the tell command :
tell (window "miaw demo") to getStuffedwill have one of two effects. If "miaw demo" has a handler for the getStuffed message, it will execute. If not, it'll crash with an alert (pretty graceful, NOT!) so make sure you only send movies messages they understand.Among the uses for MIAWs are: dialog boxes, progress bars, toolbars, floating palettes, control panels, debugging utilities and movie-building utilities.