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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.
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 Scans machines "It's only 5 years out of date, so not the worse I've seen."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.
Seems they'd cover all their bases with that, as that there are still a lot of holdouts that do not want to rent their software.
I'm still holding at their CS6 suite of tools...while there have been some nice additions to like Photoshop, there's nothing that radical that I can't still do in CS6 for the most part.
I'm working a lot with the Affinity Photo, and even their Affinity Designer....both are about 98% of what Adobe offers in PS and AI...and I gotta say, AF is quite a bit faster and less of a resource hog than PS, and the updates are free, and is a stand alone license.
I like Adobe products, but I am still not able to allow myself to go for the rental model.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Other than the money grab of reoccuring licensing, there's another reason why they can't do a "rent" and "own" on the same product line is because of Sarbanes-Oxley. Essentially, when you create a software version, you book R&D costs against that version. So, you make version 11.0, and it takes you three years to make that version, you book all of your costs against that version. You then identify features and push it out. When people buy that new version, you then report revenue against that version and you start to book new R&D against the future version. What that means is you need to create demarcations in the sand of what features ship with which versions, and generally you have to set timetables against those versions.
With the way Adobe is doing the cloud versions, they changed their revenue model. They are able to book R&D against current monthly income and book revenue against current product. This allows them to do continual development and continual deployment on their products. People don't have to wait for the next version to get the next feature, and there isn't a huge rush to get new features in by X date in order to ship. It stabilizes the workload of R&D across the year, and makes it so you don't have huge pushes every 18 months to get everything done.
Now, Adobe could make two product lines like Microsoft does (Office vs. Office 365 for example) that share a common code base, but that does make it harder, to book development costs correctly.
You can thank Enron and Worldcom for these rules....
Adobe does have both a rent and standalone license for Lightroom. They're just using that accounting rule as justification and forcing people onto a rental model.
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..