EXCLUSIVES

By Trey Yancy

2002 was an interesting news year for Mac-based designers. Prominent among these news events was a legal struggle in which Adobe egged Macromedia's car and Macromedia responded by running over Adobe's lawn flamingos.

Although Macromedia came out more or less ahead, the legal wrangling prompted Macromedia to rework some of its user interface, the result being the phased introduction of its MX products. The latest and perhaps greatest of these is Macromedia's flagship multimedia development application, Director MX.

Director is a powerful application and it has a serious learning curve for intermediate users, yet it provides tools that beginners can use to create impressive projects without having to write a line of Director's proprietary scripting language, "Lingo." It has been a leading multimedia application since the early days of System 7 and has undergone many enhancements over the years, not the least of which was the introduction of 3-D animation in version 8.5. (See MD, Fall 2001). Now at version 9 (a.k.a. MX) it has an improved interface and some new features that are certain to be of value to Flash developers, advanced scripters, and to developers interested in extending their customer base to include the hearing, vision, or motor disabled.

New Interface

The first thing you notice is the new interface which, as expected, bears a resemblance to the rest of the MX line. The large number of floating panels has always been a bit of a challenge, even for those with dual monitor systems, but with Director MX most of these panels can be consolidated into a few groups so that you can have multiple panels sharing the same tabbed window.

One example of this is the cast window. Each cast can have its own tab in the same panel, making it easy to jump between them. Dragging cast members between casts still requires separate cast panels, but otherwise this is a very efficient system. Also, unlike the simple Adobe style drag-and-drop action used in some of Macromedia's pre-MX applications, grouping and ungrouping panels is handled via popup menus (Hence, the lawn flamingos).

There are a number of other interface tweaks, a few examples of which include separate Lingo popup listings for 3-D (both alphabetical and categorized), a two-pane enter and result message window, and the addition of control panel functions to the bottom of the stage window. Those of us who tend to create densely populated scores will also appreciate the easier-to-read font used in sprite and marker labels.

New Features

Director has long been able to incorporate Flash content, including the ability to insert Lingo scripts into a Flash movie, say, for attenuating a Director soundtrack while the Flash movie is playing. With Director MX these capabilities are significantly enhanced. Also new to Director is the ability to edit Flash movies via a launch-end-edit menu command. Another enhancement is a Flash remoting feature for interacting with and serving content from a Cold Fusion server via Director. (By the way, a Mac version of Cold Fusion has yet to surface, but conditions appear to be favorable).

Scripting and debugging is easier with Director MX, thanks to a window that combines the two functions in side-by side panes. Also handy is a new object inspector that can be summoned from both the script and message windows and which allows the user to examine and modify properties without scripting. Other scripting improvements are line numbering, the color coding of recently changed elements, and improved autoformatting.

Of particular interest is a set of federally compliant accessibility features including text-to-speech, captioning, and the ability to navigate by tabbing between elements. In addition to incorporating accessibility into live projects, it can also be added to existing Director applications. While these capabilities may be a boon to those with disabilities, I can imagine all sorts of interesting ways to incorporate these functions for all viewers.

Another nice feature is the ability to incorporate QuickTime 6 content, along with MPEG 4 video and the ability to control QuickTime wired sprites via Lingo.

Observations

There is a lot to like in Director MX, but there are a few improvements I'd like to see. One would be the ability to attach panels to each other in such way that if one panel is visible, all attached panels are also visible. (The tendency of OS X to bury a window of a foreground application beneath a window of a background app can be a genuine pain in the neck).

The drawing and vector tools in Director have never been particularly useful, but it is easy to specify external applications as the bitmap and vector editors of choice. Also, while MX incorporates improvements in memory management, I would like to see better optimization features so that you can create projects containing large bitmapped animations, and output them into compact, efficient, and fast-running movies.

Another suggestion is that the documentation could provide much better contextual information for advanced script elements, giving beginners and intermediate users a better understanding of scripting by going beyond the "what" and "how" and spending a bit more time on the "why."

The last item on my wish list is the ability to output a finished project to any platform from a single copy of Director. Why buy a second copy for Windows output when all you need to do is to create a platform-specific stub projector containing nothing more than three lines of Lingo and access to a folder of Windows Xtras?

Conclusion

Director is a powerhouse application and is truly in a class by itself. Its ability to build interactive applications incorporating a wide range of media and to distribute the result in an equally wide variety of forms - ranging from web and CD to kiosks and those digital overhead menus at MacDonalds ­ is impressive. Its accessibility enhancements are a big plus, as are its support of QuickTime 6, the manipulation of Flash objects, its 3-D features, its new interface, and its consolidated scripting and debugging features ­ not to mention its OS X support. All this combines to make Director MX worth the price of an upgrade.

Price: $1,199 > From: Macromedia, www.macromedia.com > Pros: Improved scripting and debugging, accessibility features, improved Flash and QuickTime integration > Cons: Marginal drawing and paint tools, large output files, platform-specific output