Quantumwave Interactive Inc.
Interactive media development . Programming . Design . Consulting
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Macromedia Director is one of the most versatile tools for interactive authoring. It has proven itself over the years as the tool of choice for professional multimedia developers. Evolved from an animation program from too many years ago, Director today is a mature environment for interactive media development. For the beginners, Director seems like a super program made up of different components: paint, vector drawing editor, rich text editor, animation timeline and onionskin, video and sound, HTML and hyperlinks, Java export, Shockwave... and more. For the serious programmers, Director is a fun and creative development environment with its programming language called Lingo. Lingo is a high level object-oriented language providing many features for interactive multimedia development. It supports inheritance (allows runtime ancestor switching for the creative geeks), encapsulation (not as strict as some other languages), polymorphism, and supports third-party software components called Xtras, or on the Win32 platforms with ActiveX controls as well. Although Director is a relatively easy program for beginners to get started in, its depth and quirks can drive them away as well. The following list of links is provided for Director developers so they can find solutions and inspirations from other developers. There are many other sites providing information on Director, so this list is by no means complete.
Xtras:
Find my tips and questions at Direct-L (Director developers mailing list): In these archives, you'll find tips and questions I posted at the Direct-L mailing list related to Director, Shockwave, Lingo, Javascript, security issues, and multimedia development. Some of these messages were posted by others referencing something I posted or have done. Please note that some of my email addresses in older messages are obsolete. Most messages were posted in 1996 and 1997. Search engine and database are provided by Director Web.
Also read about (and download Director Windows palette files) on importing Windows system palette into Director without color remapping.
Meeting with Macromedia's CEO:
Back in the summer of 1993, I was in Hong Kong for vacation. Through an unexpected arrangement, I met with (former) Macromedia's President and CEO John C. (Bud) Colligan in his hotel suite (he's second from the left and I'm on the far right). We chatted for over an hour on Macromedia and the future of multimedia. I wrote an article on the meeting and it was published in MdN magazine (now renamed to IdN). |
