Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 !!
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).
I would argue they knew EXACTLY "what to do with it". They bought Macromedia to kill off their last relevant competitor. That's all they cared about, and that's what they accomplished.
#DeleteChrome
"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 ________
You have absolutely no fucking idea what you are talking about. Director was an amazing Authoring Tool for Interactive Content well before the Days of Flash and Java Applets. In fact, Director was out a few years before the Mosaic Web Browser was created. The World Wide Web as we know it didn't even exist back then, aside from a hand full of sites that existed mainly out of novelty. Director was the IDE and SDK of choice for CD-ROM based Interactive Media, which back in it's day in the early to mid 90's was the main source of Personal Entertainment on PCs before Web Sites, Modern Social Media and Streaming and most certainly inspired an entire generation of Content Developers and Programmers