• Flash 10 support
• Flex Components Support
• Cloth physics support
• 3D hardware anti‐aliasing support
• Character controller support
• Shockwave for Mac 64 bit

Far more information and discussion can be found in this Director Forum post.

It seems to work nicely with Safari in either 64 or 32 bit mode, as well as Firefox 3.6+. On the Mac version of Firefox 4.0b3 it is still having many problems with the transparent region bug. Hopefully they fix this before 4.0 is released. This same bug keeps coming and going with various releases of Firefox.

So far the only thing I’ve seen is with the updateStage call. It doesn’t seem to be working when running in 64-bit mode, but it does in 32-bit.

My Mac is much happier now and will survive without updateStage.

Here are the details from Allen at Adobe.

Modifications to Shockwave in update 11.5.7.609 are as listed below:

Several Security Updates as listed here;

http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-12.html

This release is considered a critical security update, as detailed on the linked security bulletin.

Details of the modified (additional) Cross Domain Policy changes follow;

Cross Domain Policy changes

Earlier to Director 11.5, there was no Cross-domain checking based on the policy file and thus when we play any shockwave content which was accessing data from a server outside the domain, it used to throw-up security dialogs. In Director 11.5, we introduced the cross-domain checking based on policy files, placed on the servers. This meant that even the URLs accessed by the SWFs were being checked by the Shockwave player against the policy file. But flash player as such does cross-domain checking through policy files or through other security mechanisms (security.allowDomain). The checks which were done through the latter mechanism inside Flash player are not supported in Shockwave and because of this, the content which were accessed by this mechanism failed inside Shockwave.

For example, we have a youTube video player asset, which is a SWF file and this can be used play different youtube videos by specifying the video ID. This has been implemented in Flash using the “security.allowDomain” mechanism for accessing the content from the YouTube server. This SWF can be hosted on any server (not only YouTube) and the videos can be streamed in.

This movie when embedded inside the Shockwave player fails since the player checks only the policy file on the YouTube server. And this policy File on YouTube server does not list any of domains.

In order to address this issue, we have introduced a flash cast member property cdpCheckMode which can be set to either #useMediaPolicy (to use the flash player’s cross domain checks) or #useSWPolicy (to use Shockwave’s cross domain checks).

When we set the property to #useSWPolicy and if the policy file doesn’t have the necessary entry then the content developer has two options.

1. If the movie property enableSecurityDialog is set to true then security dialogs will appear in the Shockwave movie while trying to access the content and the option of displaying the content is given to the end user.

2. On the other hand, if this flag is not set then the movie will fail silently.

_movie.enableSecurityDialog

Usage

– Lingo syntax

_movie.enableSecurityDialog

// JavaScript syntax

_movie.enableSecurityDialog;

Description

Movie property; default value is FALSE, If it is false then the movie will fail silently. If it is set to TRUE then security dialogs will appear in the Shockwave movie while trying to access the content and the option of displaying the content is given to the end user.

Example

This statement sets the enableSecurityDialog property to True which will show the dialogs.

– Lingo syntax

on prepareMovie
_movie.enableSecurityDialog = TRUE
end

// JavaScript syntax

function prepareMovie()
{
_movie.enableSecurityDialog = 1;
}

cdpCheckMode (Flash cast member property)

Usage

– Lingo syntax

member(whichFlashMember).cdpCheckMode

// JavaScript syntax

member(whichFlashMember).cdpCheckMode;

Description

Flash member property; default value is useSwPolicy. When we set the property to #useSWPolicy it will use Shockwave’s cross domain checks and if the policy file doesn’t have the necessary entry then the content developer has two options.

1. If the movie property enableSecurityDialog is set to true then security dialogs will appear in the Shockwave movie while trying to access the content and the option of displaying the content is given to the end user.

2. On the other hand, if this flag is not set then the movie will fail silently.

When it is set to #useMediaPolicy it will use the flash player’s cross domain checks.

Example

This statement sets the cdpCheckMode property to #useMediaPolicy which will follow the flash player’s cross domain checks.

– Lingo syntax

on beginSprite me
member(2).cdpCheckMode = #useMediaPolicy
end

// JavaScript syntax

function beginSprite(me)
{
member(2).cdpCheckMode = symbol(“useMediaPolicy”);
}

Be sure to follow me on twitter just in case I get around to doing short/sweet posts. I noticed the other day I have lots of comments awaiting approval that my WordPress never bothered to let me know about. I’ll get to that this weekend.

There was a rumor on Direct-L that an announcement related to Director may happen in a few weeks, so if anything happens I’ll be sure to let you know. I just wish they would get a version of Shockwave for OSX 10.6. Such is life.

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.

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?

This is definitely friendlier than the prior message.

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.

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.

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.