Adobe exec: ‘Director is not dead’

“Long-time Director users have been wondering where the product has been heading even before Macromedia was swallowed up by Adobe, so who better than Adobe’s Product Manager for Director and the Shockwave Player himself, Tom Higgins, to bring us up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the world of Director? The bottom line seems to be that the Director faithful can breathe a little easier, as Adobe appears not to have forgotten about you,” Kevin Schmitt reports for Digital Media Net.

“Director is not only alive, but apparently well. Intel Mac-native and Windows Vista versions are on the way, and a new release should be coming next year,” Schmitt reports.

Full interview, “Director is not dead,”  here.

19 Comments

  1. Director is an awesome application 10 times more robust and powerful than Flash.
    It can do many things. You can even write/program mini software applications with it.
    It’s used mainly for designing kiosks and interactive CDs and games.

  2. YES!

    I have used Director since version 5, it BLOWS Flash away, and I have been worried like all other Lingo Heads, that it might just go away….

    Now I can onMouse up to my hearts content!

    THANKS ADOBE….REALLY!!! ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

    MDW-Really ironic?

  3. Adobe Apollo is also in the mix there somewhere:

    http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo

    http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1967280,00.asp

    Excerpt:
    “This is the natural evolution of what [Adobe and Macromedia] have been promoting for a long time,” said Todd Hay, Adobe director of platform marketing and developer relations. “A lot of our core community really sees PDF not as a portable document format but rather a portable application container.”

    The idea behind Apollo, Hay said, is to enable apps currently made from Flash and PDF to “move beyond the browser” by assigning Flash-based apps a desktop icon that can be launched like traditional apps and utilities.

    “It’s incorporating the skills that people are using with HTML and adding to that much tighter integration with the desktop,” Hay said. “So it’s kind of a bridging the worlds of the in-browser Flash experience and the desktop client Reader experience—but focused on the delivery of a new form of rich-media applications.”

    Apollo will also bridge the print and software world, traditionally Adobe’s bailiwick, with the exuberance of the third-party developer market, which was Macromedia’s bread-and-butter.

    Flash developers probably will have a head start in creating Apollo apps, but Hay said his team is working hard so PDF developers and those who work in HTML and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript with XML) can start building apps in their familiar environments and then also enrich their productions with Flash.”

  4. Director seemed forgotten by Macromedia since 8.5.

    All the following updates were extremley buggy, mediocre and unecessary.

    Thank God I found an excellent replacement: iShell <url>www.ishell.com</url> from the guys a Tribeworks.

    These guys were actually Apple employees from the Quicktime division!

    But alas, it is still not UB (though in the works) but it doesn’t make use of the newest Quartz technology.

    Anyway, for Director to make me switch, they really have to make use of Apple technology such as Quartz, Core Video, Core Audio, Core DB*.

    iShell rocks for digital signage applications, kiosks and interactive CD/DVD.

    *Mac OS X Tiger built-in database functions which name I forget.

  5. Yea! Hooray! As someone who made a healthy livelihood from Director-based development, this is glad tidings, indeed! Director can still fly toruses around Flash in many areas. In fact, most of my Flash work is contained inside of Director engines. FWIW, this is not a surprise for us insiders, though. This was posted to the Director discussion boards last week.

  6. I sincerely hope that Adobe is not actually trying to make PDF into a “portable application container.”

    Then we can get compromised via PDFs, we will have to have little notification bars in our browsers that go, “Warning, you are about to open a PDF.”

    No thanks. ActiveX has done enough damage already. Don’t need another portable app container.

    Plus, we already have a way to integrate HTML coding skills with the desktop. It’s called Dashboard.

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