Adobe should sell Director
Freehand is dead, which isn’t a great surprise. Adobe weren’t likely to maintain both Illustrator and Freehand as two applications for the same job. It’s a shame for the enthusiastic and vocal Freehand user community, but life goes on…
… Which brings me to another of Adobe’s unwanted stepchildren: Director. Still alive, but buried behind the “see all products” link on Adobe.com.
I vividly remember one of my first multimedia design lectures at university in 1996. The tutor told us to ready ourselves, and launched Director. The stage, score, cast and scripts panels appeared, as did a sinking feeling in everyone’s stomach. At this point I’d never owned a computer and only dabbled slightly with Photoshop at college. This new app looked like my worst nightmare.
I went back to halls, stopping at the uni bookshop to buy Director 4.0 Academic. I called my folks, and told them that waiting until the second year to buy a mac was out of the question. I needed one right away.
A project or two later, and I was comfortable with it. A complex tool, but it gave up its secrets easily. From simple slideshows to shockwave games, complex applications and CD-ROMs, I used Director for several years.
The only grievance I ever had with Director was its quirky scripting language “Lingo” where common concepts had unfamiliar names (eg: Director calls an array a list) and its unhelpful help. It was quite tricky to migrate to Flash. I found it easier to liken Flash to Adobe After Effects than to Director.
These days, I don’t use Director at all. Flash has assumed its place in my toolbox. That isn’t the case for everyone though – there is still a busy community there too.
Many apps have a storied life of development, acquisition and reincarnation. Flash’s history can be traced to a small company called FutureWave and a little app called SmartSketch (later FutureSplash Animator, Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash).
If Adobe doesn’t want to own Director and take it forward, they should sell it to someone who does.
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May 24th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
“If Adobe doesn’t want to own Director and take it forward, they should sell it to someone who does.”
See : Apollo
May 24th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Um found that a little vague sorry.
What are you saying, that Apollo is set to take Director’s place?
May 27th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Take a look, employing a desktop framework to Flash, providing rich multimedia applications with both online and offline support and the option to develop your own custom addons?
Sounds like director to me, only much better.
With flash paper we’re seeing adobe consolidate their offerings behind the flash format and so it makes sense their ‘new’ director would follow suit, rather than continue to demand people have two different players installed.
May 27th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I had a quick look at Apollo a few weeks ago. It sounded interesting, but I thought having to download the runtime engine separately was a bit of a deal breaker if you were going to use it for making CD-ROMs.
You know the drill, Company X can’t install software on their computers without six months of poncing about in the IT department…
I’ve been using Flash and Zinc for the kind of things I used to do with Director.
I’d pretty much dismissed Flash Paper as being Macromedia’s sorry looking response to Adobe PDF. Now that Adobe own it themselves I guess we’ll see what happens.
~~~ gazes into crystal ball ~~~
I see… an offspring of Flash and PDF. A bloated Adobe rich media platform that’s even slower than Adobe Reader is now.
… and they should sell Director
May 29th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
thing is… use Foxit to view PDFs, the damn thing launches in a flash.
Clearly the issue isn’t with the PDF format, but Adobe’s utterly pants reader… shame, they should buy Foxit and offer that out instead.
May 29th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Agreed. On my mac I use Preview.
I’ll check Foxit out.