| Adobe Adds Flash Support to Director Authoring Tool | | Print | |
| Monday, 18 February 2008 | |
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Although it’s been nearly three years since Adobe acquired Macromedia, some of the combinations made possible by the deal are still emerging. On this go-round, it’s the addition of the Flash run-time to the content authored in Adobe Director.
Adobe Director had its heyday in the 90s as it was the one of the best-known multimedia authoring tools where you could combine illustrations, text, photos, audio and video. It was a popular authoring platform for e-training and game developers. The result is that multimedia content authors have a choice of run times: the traditional Shockwave player, a raster-based format suited for 3D that doesn’t always require a persistent client (because its files can be run as executables); or Flash, the popular vector-based format that provides visual accuracy (and becomes an electronic print format), but is highly compute-intensive. In fact, the new version lets you mashup Shockwave and Flash, so that you could embed a Flash artifact inside a Shockwave 3D animation. While Flash is practically ubiquitous, Shockwave has penetrated only about 60% of all PCs. So Adobe wants to leverage Flash to give new juice to Director. “With YouTube taking strong advantage of flash video, it makes sense to get this into Director,” said Allen Partridge, evangelist, Adobe Director. Announced at a game developers conference (the constituency that Adobe’s targeting), Adobe Director 11, which adds Flash support, will become available on March 3.             |
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