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Adobe Is Killing Contribute, Director, and Shockwave (venturebeat.com)
Reader Krystalo writes: Adobe today announced Adobe Contribute and Adobe Director will no longer be for sale nor supported as of February 1, 2017. At the same time, Adobe is also stopping Shockwave for Mac updates and support on March 14, 2017 after the last release of the product. The reason Adobe gives for the death of Contribute and Director is simple: The company's customers are embracing "the new features and efficiencies offered by Creative Cloud." As for Shockwave, its content is made with Director, so the company is merely tying up loose ends. It's about time.
Now let's get Adobe to kill Flash, and then the entire company.
My memory is hazy, but Flash was a subset of Shockwave that was optimized for the web.
I vaguely remember it being called "Shockwave Flash" for a brief time.
Of course, it's been a while so I could be wrong. :)
At the time, Contribute was a decent idea which, unsurprisingly, Adobe implemented badly. The idea, though, was to provide a way to allow non-technical people to directly maintain web pages containing information they know about, without hitting them with too much complexity and also limiting what they were allowed to edit. A payroll manager, for instance, could keep payroll policies on an intranet page up to date without having to know how Dreamweaver worked.
With the proliferation of Content Management Systems nowadays, the need for something like Contribute is waning. The thing that CMSes don't really do very well (compared to Contribute), though, is permissions lockdown.
It's typical of Adobe, in any case, to say "you don't need this inexpensive product anymore - just buy lots of expensive subscriptions to Creative Cloud for everyone!"
#DeleteChrome
That seems right. Back in the day it seemed that Macromedia Flash was used for animations while Macromedia Shockwave was used for games.
I miss the Shockwave Machine.
Why did Shockwave ever exist? I don't understand what the differences between it and Flash were.
To be a malware vector that everyone forgets about seems to be it's main purpose these days. "Our Flash plugins are always up to date!" "Yea, what about shockwave?" "Shock-what?" Scans machines "It's only 5 years out of date, so not the worse I've seen."
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
As a courtesy to everyone they could discontinue Flash, too.
Then who would be the savior of the universe?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Shockwave was a brand that macromedia had. It was used to describe the web viewers and players they had for all their software. There was Shockwave Flash (SWF ring a bell?), Shockwave Director, and Shockwave Freehand. The branding was understandably confusing and they simplified it later to just Shockwave player (the browser plugin to view content created in Director) and Flash player (the browser plugin to view content created in Flash). The Freehand plugin died quickly; it was replaced with the ability to export Freehand documents to SWF (flash) directly.
Yep. Hence the ".swf" extension.
I actually used to make a living with Director a few decades ago. There was a period when interactive CDs were really popular (at least to sell as a service. I don't think anyone actually watched any of them). We made things like training modules to go with stuff like printers or complex animated sales presentations. Shockwave was an attempt to provide a plug-in to play Director content in a browser.
Flash was a completely different product and code base...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Yeah, Adobe. Just finished dealing with them this morning. And by "finished", I mean finished.
I just set up a Mac with MacOS Sierra 10.12, and attempted to install my copy of Photoshop CS5. Sierra advised me to throw the installer in the trash. Seriously. That's the dialog I got. Adobe "support" told me "not compatible with 10.12", and also "there is no fix or upgrade" other than enter into a permanent wallet-sucking fest for their "subscription" based product. No. Not a chance.
So, that's the end of a multi-hundred dollar investment. Thanks, Adobe. Also, thanks, Apple. Whoever is responsible for the idiocy. Both, perhaps.
Well. So I'm screwed, right?
Not necessarily.
I know a "little bit" about image manipulation from making Windows image manipulation software. I'm retired, and previously really lacked the motivation to build an image manipulation app of my own for the Mac. Previously.
Insofar as my own needs go, I can definitely handle this, and in fairly short order, too. Others might end up benefitting as well. We will see.
Surely just an empty claim, amiright?
Well, take a Look: My bonafides begin right here.
Let's just see how many of those features I can move over from my (mostly very portable) existing image manipulation code. And how quick. Today serves as the starting line. Assuming age doesn't kick me nipples north in the short term, and no other unforeseen disaster shows its ugly face, I expect to be raising my figurative middle finger in Adobe's direction quite soon as these things go.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
but when? When they collapse? They didn't learn from the Xcode / Intel debacle, they haven't learned from grinding machines to dust with CC (10 daemons, 50+ threads for background?!) They need self-contained standalone apps. They are the reason I suggest Pages, GIMP Acorn Pixelmator with PS / ID as a (very) last resort. PS5 was the last thing I bought with my own money. Bigger is not always better.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
There's still no reason for them not to sell older versions for super cheap. CS6 should be like $50 at this point. It's not like they have to offer support or anything.
As a pirate of their software going back to PS3, that's about the only way they'd get me to pay.
The same goes for windows. I only recently bought my first legit copy(sans pre-install on laptops and the only non-self-built, a Compaq back in 98) of 7 to upgrade to 10, because I bought the key off G2A for under $30.
If you want to compare digital IP to physical goods, then the prices should depreciate like a motherfucker.
...
No. They kind of pretended it was, but it was actually a completely separate product that Adobe acquired from a company called FutureSplash. Later on, they rolled it into the Shockwave plugin along with support for Shockwave for Director.
Breakfast served all day!
I attended college back in 2000, a "Multimedia" course that focused heavily on teaching us Director with the intention of sending us out into the world to create interactive CDs. It was the very tail end of the interactive CD era but I always enjoyed using Director. Shockwave games were awesome for browser-based games in the early 2000's when compared to their Flash cousins.
Close, gramps.
Macromedia, the company who had a presentation product called Director and a browser plugin called Shockwave for Director, bought Flash (and the rest of FutureSplash) in 1996.
Adobe then bought Macromedia in 2005 for $3.4 billion.
Kid-proof tablet..
Yes, this was correct; it didn't solve everything, but with that in hand, above to point out to their customer service that they had a page on it, I got Adobe to get me the rest of the way. Then, installing the "legacy java" from Oracle handled the rest.
Guess it was really a good idea to blow a huge bitch here. :)
Thank you very much.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Kid Flash - duh.
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
I used Macromedia Director extensively about 15 years ago. It had a scripting language called lingo, with a few unique features. It supported an old syntax, something like "set the visible of sprite 10 to true", and a new syntax, more like "sprite(10).visible = true". While most usual statements could be expressed in any way, some statements could only be expressed in the old syntax, and some other statements only in the new syntax. Worse even, there were a few corner cases where a statement written in the old syntax behaved slightly different from its new syntax counterpart. For example, the old syntax would return 0 while the new syntax would throw an error, I can't remember the exact details, but something like that, so you'd have to be very careful. It took me more than a year, maybe two, to find and work around many of these idiosyncrasies. It was, simply put, awful. It also had many bugs, some of them reported and not fixed for years.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
No, my guesswork was precisely accurate. Adobe told me the upgrade would not run. They were either ignorant or uninformed, and, the way to get this to run, according to their own web pages, was to go inside the installer bundle and execute code from within the MacOS section of the bundle directly as well as downloading Oracle's legacy Java support, which is exactly what I meant when I said "jumping through hoops I was not informed of." Neither the installer or Sierra suggested any such thing, nor did you.
Also, whether Sierra "offers to trash installers as a matter of routine" isn't the issue: The issue was that Sierra refused to run the installer. Advice is one thing. Refusal is something else entirely.
All's well, though, as other posts pointed me to the procedure required, and it worked. I appreciate that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'll miss it so much.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...