I do like Linux, I am waiting for Ubuntu 8, and I dream of a day when OS’s are all open source. But for now, making a Publish to Linux option in Director makes about as much sense as a Publish to BeOS or Publish to AmigaOS option, IMHO. Director barely has the ability to Publish to MacOS, after all, at least in its current form.

I say they should fix it. Fix it some more. Then fix it. Then promote it.

Sadly, after the D11 launch, I don’t think they’ll do any of those.

Even porting Director to one of the other BSDs would be a major headache, because Director, for good or evil, relies on the many closed/proprietary software layers Apple has built on top of Darwin, such as Aqua and Carbon. All this becomes screamingly obvious if you run Apple’s X11 environment for OS X.

I would much rather Adobe focused on getting Director to work properly on the currently supported platforms (including Mac PPC, but I guess that’s already asking too much). A bit of promotion would also be tremendously helpful in getting the Director community to stay faithful.

If you want to target Linux with multimedia content today, go with Flash, or perhaps Revolution (or its variants).

First, its users share is more like 4%, and growing. Did Macromedia abandonned Mac when its share had fallen to 3% in the late 90′? No. Because otherwise, Director would have not been a “multiplatform” product.

Now the new reality is that there is 3 serious competing OS. If we can consider Window$ has a serious product.

Even Flash has its base in Linux with a player on par with the Mac/Windows version. Adobe AIR will be launch soon for various Linux distributions.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Adobe-to-Deliver-AIR-for-Linux/

So, I am asking : Why not Director, if it is still a “produce ONCE, publish EVERYWHERE” development tool? Museums, schools and kiosk producers would benefit greatly not having to pay for OS license on each machine running a Director multimedia application.

All 1% of us.

Even Flash has player support on Linux. It’s normal, the Mac OS is parent to Linux in many ways – meaning a not so difficult port.

I’ll get back on the Director train when there will be an Adobe commitment to true multiplatform again. I am a long time Director developper – since Macromind! But there is no more Window$ or BlingBling Mac on my desktops, so…