Director @ Night

Director Sites Going, Going…

It was pointed out on Direct-L forums that another Director site has vanished from the web. The site titled Animation Math in Lingo by JM Harward now has an expired URL (http://www.jmckell.com/). Having sites go away is never good. You can still see an old version of the site on the Internet Archive.

In the meantime, I continue to hope that a version of Shockwave that runs on a Mac (without having to flip my bits) shows up one of these days. Please…pretty please.

6 comments February 22nd, 2010

First Director, Now Flash?

There was an interesting post on FanBoy.com the other day asking if Flash was nearing the end of its life. It starts out mentioning how Director used to be king.

During the CD-ROM era of the 90s the only real game in town was Macromind Director. The program first started life out as an animation program bit with the boom in multimedia Director gained a programming language called Lingo and had a loyal following. Then the damn web came along and ruined it all: There was a web version of Director called Shockwave, but due to the overhead of bitmap graphics another program called Flash started to build rapid momentum. Macromedia would acquire Flash and rumor has it that Director is still around but the notion of getting a Lingo gig is history. And now that it’s the year 2010 I’m seeing the same thing slowly start to happen to Flash all over again.

I continue to wonder if Director is dead. The total lack of support for Shockwave on OSX 10.6 is really starting to feel like a nail in the coffin. Expecting casual computer users to flip the browser to run in 32-bit mode is something that just won’t happen. Since I’ve devoted the past fifteen years of my career to creating educational content for Shockwave I’m starting to feel I need to give it up and let the software gods pull my old Director 4 CD from my cold dead fingers.

In a thread on the Adobe Director forum malcomvincent said this:

In the education community, cross platform is more than a nice-to-have, it’s beyond important. If Shockwave isn’t available on the standard Mac setup it’s useless. If the Director IDE isn’t being actively developed for the current OS it’s not a dependable thing to predicate a development programme on.

We had this for a while with Rosetta / Firefox / OSX and after a fraught period of fighting with clients using Safari native for everything else and Firefox with Shockwave in Rosetta, everyone just gave up and we had to drop Mac support.

Director 11 / Shockwave on Macs was the only chance we have of staying with Director at all. To find that we are left high and dry with no solution again after six months of usable time in 10.5 is criminal on Adobe’s part.

The shockwave install on PCs is bad enough … it’s only saved because of the MSI version.

When OS X first came out, Safari was the problem browser, at least Firefox / Rosetta / Shockwave was 90% dependable. Now Firefox / Shockwave is 100% undependable and all we have is Safari / Shockwave which is at best 90% dependable. To find that Adobe have taken that away is unbelievable.

Get your act together guys. Adobe appear to be killing Director as a product without admitting to it.

You can kill it by saying you are killing it, or you can kill it by starvation. At least owning up and saying you are stopping development would give us a clear path, we could cut our losses and make a decision on what to do next.

Giving a little bit of encouragement and then taking away all hope repeatedly is a very immoral thing to do.

*Furious*
Education Software Developer
UK

That sums it up. Every day I wonder if the End-Of-Life statement for Director will be released. I’ve been spending a lot of time learning ActionScript. I just haven’t been able to become a fan. I think Lingo ruined me. I didn’t have to worry about case. If I missed a little bracket I wouldn’t be presented with bizarre error statements. I could say ‘i = 1′ just by typing that. In AS3 it requires about fifty lines (maybe that is a minor exaggeration).

The reason Flash has become such a hot topic in the past week was the introduction of the iPad (please…no jokes about the name). The iPad does not support Flash. This has the web community rather split. Some say who cares, others think Flash is the only thing worth seeing on the web.

I’m somewhat neutral on the topic. I use FlashBlock on Firefox to avoid most everything, but there are some specific things I want to see (such as what I create). But on the iPad, I have an opinion. I want one. I plan to order one as soon as I can. It will be able to do all the typical things I do in the evening. Browsing, reading, catching up on email, an occasional game, etc.

I also played with GameSalad the other day. It took me about 25 minutes to make a small educational app for my iPhone (or iTouch or iPad). I found the interface simple and straightforward. I felt comfortable with the program. When I first started playing with Director back in 1994 I found that easy to use. It became my favorite toy, and then my career.

Will GameSalad become my next toy? Will my career turn towards the iPhone/Touch/Pad? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to get that iPad in my hands and see what I can do with it.

Or maybe Director will rise from the dead. What are the odds? What is Adobe thinking?

5 comments February 3rd, 2010

Shockwave Updated: New Snow Leopard Statement

An updated version of Shockwave was released today. When installing on Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6) it now gives you a message to run Safari in 32-bit mode.

This is definitely friendlier than the prior message.

Add comment November 3rd, 2009

Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6), Shockwave, and Director

Apple has released the latest version of their operating system which is commonly referred to as Snow Leopard (OSX 10.6). What does this mean to users that want to see Shockwave-based content? What does this mean to those that author with Director MX 2004 or newer? What does this mean for projectors from Director MX 2004, 11, or 11.5?

Here is the scoop based on my observations.

For Shockwave things will run fine if you run in 32-bit mode in Safari. To do that you can select the Safari icon and Get Info. Then select 32-bit mode. You can read that in greater detail on this ExploreLearning blog post.

Safari in 32-bit mode

For authoring I’ve tested Director 11.5 and have not noticed any problems. However, Director MX 2004 is a different story. For some strange reason it is one of just seven programs in the entire world that are restricted from opening by Apple and the new operating system (read the Apple Technote). Out of all the programs in the world, what on Earth does Director MX 2004 do on a computer that causes Apple to ban the app?

Director MX 2004 Restricted!

Somewhere Apple is storing information that causes this message to appear. If anyone knows where that is I’d love to know I tried opening the Director MX 2004 package and changed the CFBundleIdentifier in the info.plist from 2004 to 2005 just to see what would happen. When I did that the program began to launch, the icon would bounce in the dock a few times, and then it would crash. I got the standard crash message at this point where I could report it to Apple or cancel. I canceled. I edited the info.plist once again and set it back to 2004. At this point it would always crash and I wouldn’t get the “restricted” message again. I’d say I broke something. Oh well…seems at this point it is impossible to run Dir MX 2004 on Snow Leopard.

For older projectors (that could run under 10.5 with Rosetta) things are both good and bad. The projectors will still run, but unfortunately Apple has decided that Rosetta is an optional installation now, so it doesn’t get installed by default. When I tried to launch a projector I got a message that Rosetta was needed.

Rosetta Needed Message

I agreed to install it and the 2 meg download took place. The next time I launched the projector it worked normally.

Rosetta Download

You must always remember that the first time you launch something that needs Rosetta it will take 15 or more seconds. On subsequent launches it will just take a few seconds.

Projectors created with Director 11+ will run as expected without Rosetta.

I’m still shocked that Director MX 2004 is one of just seven apps that are officially restricted by Apple. I basically use the older version of Director all the time to edit older content that I don’t want the files to have to be updated with the new unicode text. I guess I’ll now have to keep one computer running 10.5. I’m bummed. If anyone does find a way to get MX 2004 running on 10.6, please drop me a line.

Update: I forgot to mention the Shockwave installation issue. When I tried to install Shockwave I got the following message saying that it only works on 10.4 and 10.5. I clicked OK and then ran the installer. It properly installed the plugin. On the other hand, the uninstaller seemed to run for a long time and not really do anything. I waited about five minutes and then force quit it, so not entirely sure if it was doing anything or not.

Shockwave Install warning message on Snow Leopard.

7 comments September 2nd, 2009

Shockwave 3D vs. Google

Google introduced a new way to create 3D content for the web. Looks interesting.

Most content on the web today is in 2D, but a lot of information is more fun and useful in 3D. Projects like Google Earth and SketchUp demonstrate our passion and commitment to enabling users to create and interact with 3D content. We’d like to see the web offering the same type of 3D experiences that can be found on the desktop. That’s why, a few weeks ago, we announced our plans to contribute our technology and web development expertise to the discussions about 3D for the web within Khronos and the broader developer community.

4 comments April 21st, 2009

Firefox 3 and Mac: Solution to Vanishing Content

Ever since Firefox 3 came out there has been a problem on Macs where chunks/regions of the the displayed dcr file would would just “vanish” and show the background color of the html page you were viewing. [Note: With FF 3.0.1 I would rarely see this on a PC as well.] On Direct-L Valentin posted a possible solution that could be used to deal with this problem by adding some javascript to the html page.

You can see the code that was used below, read the entire thread (it is a long thread), and see it in action here.

HTML code that helps to properly display Shockwave-content on Macs that are using Firefox 3.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>FF3 mac sw bug fix</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
function init(){
	var isFFMac=(navigator.platform.indexOf('Mac')>-1&&navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Firefox')>-1);
	if(isFFMac){
		var sw=document.getElementById('sw');
		sw.onmousedown=function(){return false};
		sw.data=sw.data;
	}
}
//-->
</script>
</head>
<body onload="init()">



<div>
<!--[if IE]>
<object classid="clsid:233C1507-6A77-46A4-9443-F871F945D258" width="320" height="240">
<param name="src" value="myFileName.dcr" />
<![endif]-->
<!--[if !IE]>-->
<object id="sw" type="application/x-director" data="myFileName.dcr" width="320" height="240">
<!--<![endif]-->
<param name="PlayerVersion" value="11" />



</object>
</div>



<script type="text/javascript">document.write('<'+'div style="color:green">JAVASCRIPT IS ACTIVATED!<'+'/div>');</script>
<noscript><div style="color:red">YOU DON'T HAVE JAVASCRIPT ACTIVATED!</div></noscript>
</body>
</html>

Update (July 20, 2009). Note: Using the method has proven to have problems with editable text members that are displayed in the content. So as of now, nothing seems to work reliably. Firefox 3.5.1 is now the current release, and it continues to have the same problem. Adobe has stated that FF is not included on the list of approved Mac browsers.

Add comment April 12th, 2009

Updated Shockwave 11.5 is Under Development

From Allen on various mailing lists:

Just an update, as I know many are interested. Early next week we plan to deliver a fix for the text line spacing (height) issue in Shockwave 11.5 to the Shockwave pre-release testers. Expect a Shockwave update following that session. Normally such cycles take a minimum of two weeks. (We added a permanent Shockwave pre-release beta testing group, which will always be able to activate for various Shockwave updates.)

Danny K, a couple of the imaging lingo errors you reported were verified and marked to fix, but aren’t planned for this short term update. Apparently they existed in 11 as well. (performance issue on 8 bit imaging objects)

Sound concerns re the removed audio compression settings on export. The simple answer is that mp3 files are substantially more optimized and are the preferred file format in order to deal with pre-compressing audio. I think the larger community concern is that legacy projects may contain high volumes of wav files and that absent the ability to “compress at once” and store in cast it becomes untenable to imagine dealing with huge stores of files to convert to mp3. I’ve asked engineering to give me some options / perhaps a white paper for handling conversion as such. I imagine that it would be simple enough to simply write a widget in Director now that we can save mp3 etc. to just rip through the sounds in a project and save all the wavs as mp3 sounds. I’ll let you know when I either get something back substantial, or I come up with some kind of pipeline myself. Perhaps others have given this some thought as well.

3 comments March 31st, 2009

Director/Shockwave 11.5 Gets Noticed

When Director 11 was released last year it really didn’t seem to get mentioned anywhere. It wasn’t until a few months ago that it showed up on MacUpdate. Things are quite different this time.

Shockwave 11.5 has been in the top 5 of the MacUpdate Most Popular downloads since it came out. Director 11.5 got covered on MacNN, MacWorld, and Macsimum News. (Can you tell I’m a Mac guy?)

The screenshots from a few moments ago show the Director story was very popular on MacWorld, and Shockwave is currently #4 in the weekly downloads on MacUpdate.

It seems as if the Adobe PR department has been much busier with this version of Director than they were with the last. That seems to be a very good sign that Director is here to stay for a bit longer.

1 comment March 26th, 2009

Director 11.5 Has Arrived

A new version of Director was released today, along with a new version of Shockwave.

You can download Director, Shockwave, as well as many demos at this location (you’ll need to login with your Adobe ID).

Let the fun begin!

Update: Director 11.5 can also be found on Amazon.

Update 2: List of features:

• Enriched audio capabilities Make your games sound as real as they look with 5.1-channel surround sound, real-time mixing, audio effects, and DSP filters.
• Enhanced video capabilities Enhance your user’s multimedia experience using H.264-video integration that provides full-screen, high-definition video in multimedia applications and games.
• New 3D importer for SketchUp Rapidly create rich 3D environments using the many ready-made 3D models available through Google SketchUp.
• Streaming support Stream audio and video over the Internet using RTMP support.
• New data type Access and manipulate binary data using the ByteArray data type.
• Enhanced physics engine Support for dynamic concave rigid bodies.
• Enhanced productivity Support for multiple undo/redo operations.
• Cross domain policy
• Enhancements to the text engine
• Open Type Font (OTF) embedding support on Macintosh OS.
• Class-based kerning support.
• Hinting support at a member level.
• Enhancements to platform and browser support
• Macintosh OSX 10.5 (authoring and runtime) support.
• Firefox 3.0 support.

More information can be found on DirectorForum in this thread.

10 comments March 23rd, 2009

Director Game Takes 2nd Place

The uDevGames contest recently announced the winners. The contest is “iDevGames’ unique grass-roots initiative to highlight our community to gamers, as well as a development platform capable of producing the most innovative cross-platform titles in the industry.”

Constellation (created with Director) won 2nd place in the Best Overall, Best Gameplay, and Best Presentation categories!

Congratulations Matthew!

2 comments March 18th, 2009