Director 11
OMG!! Yes they really did it! Adobe announced Director 11 . I really don’t know what to think now… during my study I was infested by Director while it was quite clear Flash was becomming the new standard for online interactivity. For a moment it looked like Director died together with Macromedia, but NO! Adobe actually thinks they can reanimate it again. And what are the stunning new features? I like these ones the most:
- Enhanced user interface!! Thats great, because the interface really could use that.. so what does it look like??
That is one hell of a change compared to mx 2004 - Windows® support (now includes Windows Vista®) Are these features???? duh, ofcourse it needs to run on the current Operating Systems.- Mac support (now includes Intel® processors) Wow, intel support!!- DirectX 9 support .. ok that’s kewl- Advanced physics with included AGEIA™ PhysX™ engine .. also kewl So in general I can’t really tell what the idea of this version of Director is, I think that they wan’t to make an easy game develop environment, which is cool. But in the meantime Flash and AS3 are also getting a high performance on 3d (like papervision) and the flash player is widely supported. So what is going to happen to Director? Will Director be able to create AIR applications? Will there be a decent Flash Director Meshup or is it just a wast of shitloads of money? We’ll see.
One Response to “Director 11”
Leave a Reply
Flash and AIR have many excellent solutions for development.
However, they still seem to have a few limitations. They need
some kind of external support whether it is Shu Player, Zinc
or Jester. So there is still a place for Director if a project
needs to take full advantage of a desktop environment.
I have been using Director for many years and was
think about trying to switch over to AIR. I am in
the process of updating an old Director project
with Flash embedded in it and have run across a
few issues that I cant seem to solve with AIR.
1) AIR does not seem to be able to launch external
exe files. Launching Word, Excell, PTT and other
applications from AIR seems problematic. I read
somewhere about launching files through a browser
but it was unclear to me how to do this.
2) I dont see a clear way to port data to a Word
form. My old Director project could control Microsoft
applications through a vbScript Xtra. I could pass
data from the Flash interface to a Word form through
the Director Xtra.
One solution suggested would be to write data from
Flash in binary and creating a Word file this way.
It seemed a long way to go creating and formating a
Word form this way if it the Director solution is much
easier and direct.
Another solution offered was that AIR could copy data
to the clipboard and somehow the Word form could use
a macro to copy the data from the clipboard. The problem
with this solution is that the client does not want
any macros in the Word forms for security reasons.
3) AIR runtime needs to be installed for an AIR file
to run. For the last Director project, there was a lot
of security applied to the end users’ laptops by their
company. This prevented anything from being written
to the C: drive without administrator’s priveleges. To
get around this and installer was made to install the
Director project to the desktop since Director is a
self contained exe and everyone had rights to install
to the desktop. I’m not sure how AIR can get around
this issue.
4) AIR cant seem to provide a list of all the windows
open on the desktop. It does have built-in functions
like orderToBack() and orderToFront which puts all
AIR windows in front or behind all desktop windows.
It must have some way of detecting all windows on
the desktop if it can do this but the functionality
seems to be a protected feature.
So far I have only tried to develop AIR apps with
Flash. Maybe Flex would offer more solutions since
it seems to have some different features. AIR seems to
have the potential to deliver many different solutions.
Regretfully, so far I havent been able to get around
the above obstacles.