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Director 11: Combine all your media and interact

It's been a secret love of creative professionals for decades, but the average computer user around the world has probably never even heard of Director. Now Adobe is introducing the latest version of Director, and making it viable for all of us. Even if you've never heard of Director, you've probably seen it in action. It was used to create the original interactive displays on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and thousands of interactive CD-ROMs, from reading software and games to product catalogs and demos. Many casual games today are made with Director and most of the public kiosks that you see in museums, parks, and other public spaces were created with Director. Probably your most frequent exposure to Director is in Shockwave games, movies, and tools on the Internet. Director is the only tool that allows you to create Shockwave games. Why are so many things made with Director? Because it's easy to learn and makes authoring interactive applications faster (and consequently less expensive).

Now Adobe is making this powerful, easy-to-use multimedia tool available for everyone by delivering the newest version at a lower cost than ever. Director was conceived as an easy-to-use tool that would make it possible for non-programmers to create custom software applications. If you've never worked with Director, think of it as the master of all your media. Any time you want to combine photos, sounds, movies, 3D, or other media or want to add interactivity to a project, Director is a great solution.

What Director 11 can do for you

Director 11 provides a method for creative professionals to combine all of their favorite media into a single interactive presentation, 3D game, lesson, or software application. Whether you're launching websites from a custom catalog, making an interactive greeting card for relatives at a holiday, or writing your own custom 3D games and animations, Director can provide you with a mechanism to realize your creative vision. Because it's so easy to use and so powerful, Director can provide solutions to all kinds of problems. Need to plan for a complex interface in a hurry? Director is the perfect tool for you. Need to put together photos into an interactive album to impress your relatives? Director can help make you the media master. Need to make a 3D metaverse? Director does that too. Museum displays, DVD control, even business-to-business database and catalog solutions are all within easy reach for Director.

Director provides people with the ability to take full advantage of modern computers without forcing them to learn exactly how every facet of a computer works. With Director, everyday creative people can simply drag and drop interactivity onto their creations and then easily share that work with others. In 2008 Adobe is advancing this vision once more by reintroducing this multimedia giant to the community of artists creating amazing media.

But Director isn't just for casual users. Director has all the power of a serious multimedia engine, and all that ease of use means cost savings for professionals who take advantage of the edge Director provides. The biggest reason that Director is so powerful is because it can be extended to perform additional functions based on the needs you have at the time. This is called runtime extensibility—which basically means that custom abilities can be added to the software to meet the needs of virtually any project. Using this system of extensions (called Xtras) authors are able to make Director do virtually anything that can be done by a computer.

New features, new look, new platforms

Adobe Director 11 combines a solid group of new features, a clean new interface and appearance, and great new platform support to bring dramatically improved usability back to Director.

New features

Adobe Director/Shockwave features some of the most advanced 3D modeling and animation capabilities in any middleware multimedia authoring tool. With the release of Director 11 Adobe adds support for Aegea PhysX, an industry leading physics technology. This will allow 3D multimedia authors and game developers to create realistic physics simulations for games, architectural walkthroughs, and product demonstrations. In addition, Director 11 introduces support for Microsoft DirectX 9 technology. That means that Director and Shockwave 3D applications will play faster and display better. Director 11 also benefits from a new physics-enabled ray casting and terrains that will make games and simulations faster and more accurate.

Director 11 continues a tradition of providing easy, powerful publication options that make authoring content which can play back for the web, Windows, and Macintosh as simple as pressing a button. Director 11 also allows users to easily update content created in Director by importing the original source file and then saving the new content in the new format. Director 11 handles the heavy lifting for you.

Director remains the dominant authoring environment for authors of CD-ROMs and kiosks. This is due to its tremendous online ubiquity (over 60% penetration of the Shockwave plug-in) and the ability to author software on either a Windows PC or a Macintosh. Director is the most robust tool available for people interested in publishing cost-effective, cross-platform software.

Director is also the authoring system of choice around the world, and that tradition is augmented with the addition of Unicode text and font support in Director 11. Unicode support means that Director will be a convenient tool for people authoring programs in every language. Conventional text support was not able to handle languages with many characters in their alphabet very well. Unicode corrects that and makes creating software in other languages much easier and more intuitive.

The font rendering engine in Director 11 has also been given a makeover. Now fonts render smooth and clean, giving your projects that 21st century edge and getting rid of those fuzzy little edges common in earlier font displays.

Director 11 includes complete JavaScript support. So if you decide you want to write scripts, you can either use Director's native Lingo programming syntax or you can use industry-standard JavaScript. That means the transition is easier than ever if you've ever programmed in an ECMA style language—like ActionScript or JavaScript.

Director 11 makes life simple for Flash developers. With support for Adobe Flash CS3 content and ActionScript, it's easy to develop rich integrated applications that combine the best features of Flash and Director. Director also provides a ready option for Flash developers anxious to add real-time 3D support to their toolset. With Director, authors and developers can create dynamic 3D rich Internet applications and even combine Flash interfaces with Director's powerful 3D runtime engine. You can literally just drag your published Flash applications into Director, and easily launch Flash to edit those elements while working in Director.

New look

The new Director interface includes usability enhancements like Adobe standardized draggable tabs and shelves, along with an easy-to-navigate script window with tree views that make editing code much simpler and more organized.  Publishing enhancements give authors more control of the content they wish to publish.

New platforms

Adobe Director 11 has expanded support for operating systems, both via the playback engine (for the software and RIAs that you make) and via the authoring tool. In playback, Director 11 and Shockwave support Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac PPC, Mac OS 10.4, and Mac OS 10.5. In authoring, Director 11 supports Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS 10.4.

Evolving a vision of Director's future

Director was introduced nearly 20 years ago with the intent that it provide a platform for artists and imaginative computer users to easily create simple interactive applications and multimedia. The fundamental structure of Director has always been that the product acts as a core engine which developers may use to combine media from an extremely diverse array of applications (graphics editors, audio editors, video editors, text editors, 3D editors) and quickly create professional quality software applications that may be easily resold to mass audiences. We recognize that with so many people using Director to create their own software, and in many cases earn money from the distribution of that software, it's important to share information about our plans for Director as we move ahead with the product. Our mission with Director is as follows:

Adobe Director provides powerful, easily mastered tools for everyone to create interactive multimedia software that looks, sounds, and behaves professionally.

Director 11 remains a well-established, powerful multimedia development environment with a loyal following and a significant history of leadership in the industry. Adobe's vision for the future of Director recognizes and respects the traditions upon which this product was built, and embraces confidently the technologies which best facilitate the computing needs of the largest possible audience of computer users. Today Director remains a more powerful, stable, more ubiquitous and useful multimedia engine than any offered by competitors.

Our mission will guide our decisions about specific paths for Director in the coming years. We understand and appreciate that the audience for Director is diverse and we believe that this mission will guide decisions that will serve the community of Director developers well.    

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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