memory game strikes again (advice, comments -- ?)

ok… So I have an obsessive nature… And I really wanted there to be a preferences option to have image descriptions for each picture in my memory game. At first I used spotlight comments which were super fast, and awesome-- however I soon learned that once my project was built, or copied, all of that information was lost.

so I went the route of records… Writing a text file full of stuff like {name: “0.jpg”, comment: “pie!!”}… It works great… I even wrote a little built-in image tag editor, so I can go in and assign whatever comments to the photos I wish. Oh and, Thanks to Nigel Garvey, this was possible as I borrowed some of his code that searched for items within a long record list.

However, my problem is… Having this comment stuff is slowing down the program somewhat… On my g5-- it’s not too bad… But I played it on my powerbook g4 1.25ghz, and it actually started giving me errors (cant get item 2 of bla bla) when starting a new game because it couldn’t seem to keep up with everything going on with the record searching and comments. So i tried adding a short delay in the repeat statement where that stuff happens, to hope that it would keep my powerbook from choking… But obviously it would be nice if I didn’t have to delay things and it was much faster.

So… I would love it if some of you experts would take a look, and let me know-- is there a more efficient way to do this?

the project can be downloaded here:
http://www.collinatorstudios.com/dev/memorygame.tgz

Oh and also, I still am experiencing the strange bug of my image views suddenly disappearing for no reason like this:
http://www.collinatorstudios.com/dev/mg.png

Has anyone experienced this, and do you have any suggestions on how to not have this happen?

thank you as always.

-patrick