Let Us Now Praise MacroMind Director (fastcompany.com) 34
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.
Don't bother RTFA.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Don't bother RTFA.. (Score:1)
An article asking us to praise some old version of some irrelevant out competed shit that died Long ago.... waste of our time.... and claiming credit of inspiring everything similar and better that came after....
Fuck off...
Maybe I should write an article asking people to praise IE or maybe Netscape.... and either of those would be way more deserving...
Next time someone would write an article asking us to praise cavemen for inventing the wheel.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe I should write an article asking people to praise IE or maybe Netscape
IE, no, Mosaic... And I still use Netscape [seamonkey-project.org]. There's still no better.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe I want to see the advertisements.
Open source it !!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Why software has to die? Open source it !!!
I agree. They should lose their copyright protection if they don't make it available. We need to put relevant conditions on copyright.
Good riddance (Score:2)
Flash, Silverlight, Java applets, etc. All that proprietary binary blobs crap needs to cease to exist.
Re:Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So Adobe drops the ball (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Lingo is bizar beyond anybodys imagination. (Score:5, Interesting)
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" [livecode.com], Typo3s/Neos' "TypoScript" [typo3.org] (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.
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You're glad that Director/Lingo is being replaced by a language that was well thought out... namely JavaScript?
I come not to praise MacroMind Director (Score:1)
but to bury it.
Flash != Flash Player (Score:5, Insightful)
"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 ________
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Which timeline-based animation editors
Notepad!
I don't know which "Notepad" you're talking about, but Windows Notepad is a text editor, not a timeline-based animation editor.
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Where does Notepad show a view of the timeline? And how easy is it for animators to adapt from Adobe Flash to Notepad?
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I use Hippani to create interactive time-line based HTML5 animations.
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"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 ________
Dreamweaver. It's had Javascript capabilities to move around stuff, time, animate and interaction bindings since version 2 nearly 20 years ago.
Director is dead (Score:2)
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 programmer
no ide (Score:1)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
History Forgets.... (Score:2)
Long Live mTropolis!