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Let Us Now Praise MacroMind Director (fastcompany.com)
Adobe announced last week that it is discontinuing sales of Contribute, and Director, adding that support to Shockwave for Mac will also be stopped in March. Fast Company's editor Harry McCracken ran into Marc Canter, the industry legend who cofounded MacroMind, the company that created Director back in the 1980s. Following is an excerpt from their conversation: I took the opportunity to ask Canter for his thoughts about Director, which was born in the pre-web era when CD-ROMs seemed to be the future. He told me that 85% of the CD-ROMs published in the medium's golden age were assembled using the package. "You'd buy this $800 product and hang a shingle and make multi-millions," he said. Canter also lamented that Director doesn't receive the same appreciation for its pioneering role in interactive content creation as does Apple's HyperCard, which appeared two years after Videoworks and had a much briefer period of relevance. He's right. Even though Director long ago faded away, it gave way to Flash, which was rendered irrelevant by HTML5 -- and it deserves a spot on any list of the most significant foundational technologies of all time.
..The entire "article" is in TFS.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
And... I'm sure he made a lot of money for his works. It's not like he was running a charity or something...
Why software has to die? Open source it !!! I guess there is still one crazy guy out there that still wants to use it and develop it !!
Flash, Silverlight, Java applets, etc. All that proprietary binary blobs crap needs to cease to exist.
#DeleteFacebook
On it's best multimedia software... Incredible.
I used Macromedia Director for years, and always been puzzled by the lack of investment from Adobe in it after they brought Macromedia (like they didn't know what to do with it).
Now we have the conclusion of the saga. And yes, they didn't know what they had.
I did my Multimedia Design Diploma in 2001. One big part of the curriculum was building Multimedia Applications in Director. Our class learned programming in Lingo (the programming language of Director). With some teacher who had learned programming in Lingo and thus knew literally less than nothing about programming.
After my training I had a gig for 9 months building SAP simulations with sliced up screenshots and buckets of cobbled-together Lingo code in Director. This was such an kafkaesk thing, you'd barely believe it.
Seriously, if you want to know why Director doesn't get any praise - aside from Adobe screwing things up ... again - look at Lingo. This abysmal disaster of a PL has no equal on this planet. It's basically a programming language designed by people who couldn't really tell the difference between a value and a variable. I'm not joking.
If you think PHP is a mess, you have seen nothing my friend. Lingo takes the cake and wins the battle of bizar 'programming' languages hands down with flying flags, even with RunRevs "Transcript", Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" (Don't ask, you don't want to know, seriously now) and older versions of SQL joining the fight.
Director had some nice animation and prototyping/RAD concepts, no doubt. But at a certain point they should've brought some people in who knew what they were doing - you know, like with ActionScript 2 in Flash.
They didn't and Director died a well deserved death.
I'm so glad JavaScript is slowly taking the place of the universal frontend/ui language and, trust me, if you'd've seen Lingo, you would be too.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
but to bury it.
Attribution is what's holding us back from true progress.
"Flash, which was rendered irrelevant by HTML5"
No, Flash Player "was rendered irrelevant by HTML5", as was Shockwave. You still need some application to create vector animations that play back in the SVG or HTML Canvas environment. Which timeline-based animation editors are HTML5 animators using to create animations? Or are they all just rendering to video, which is ten times bigger than vectors and lacks any semblance of interactivity?
To create animations for Shockwave, you used Director.
To create animations for Flash Player, you used Flash.
To create animations for HTML Canvas, you use ________
They had such a lock on their niche that they seemed unassailable, back in the day.
Lingo was the technology that convinced me that programmers are born, not made. It was arcane and had a lot of reserved words to learn, but it was pretty simple to understand. Completely beyond the comprehension of most of its target audience, though.
The lesson was hammered home a few years later by iShell, which simplified authoring to triviality: their inescapable graphical environment was enormously annoying for programmers, but their forums promptly filled up with baffled content creators who couldn't handle if statements, even 'graphical' ones.
Aside from a few games, and their tech support Nazis, that's how I'll remember Director.
I'd just like to say, after having read the article description, that I have absolutely no idea what is going on here. Thank you.
Long Live mTropolis!
Don't you be trash talking Hypercard. It was revolutionary for its time.