Thanks to Eric Eve, I’ve worked out the hanging bug in Release 9 (sorry about that!). Release 10 should be stouter.
It also comes with new dialogue and a couple of new features:
- New “player mode” allows collaborators to try the game without the collaboration interface popping up. Try PLAYER MODE ON to activate this, and PLAYER MODE OFF to turn it off again.
- THINK will remind the player about what he has already learned on this play-through.
- The tag “[if immediately]…[otherwise]…[end if]” can be used to mark a variation in dialogue depending on whether a quip immediately follows its prerequisite quip, or comes in sometime later. (See the “that the safe haven seems too far away to reach tonight” quip for what this looks like in practice. This is just an extra; if it seems confusing, ignore it.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
How am I supposed to play this? I downloaded the Alabaster.gblorb file and opened it in Zoom 1.1. It showed the opening apple image which faded to a blank window with a ‘More…’ buttton in the bottom corner that did not respond to anything. Is there something I’m doing wrong?
It works for me on the Mac, under Zoom 1.1.2 ( http://www.logicalshift.co.uk/unix/zoom/ for a copy). I don’t remember the version numbers of Zoom, but it’s conceivable that if 1.1 predates some of the modern Unicode support stuff, it’s not coping well with the indexed text in Alabaster.