Macromedia Director MX 2004

5 April 2005

Macromedia is in the advanced stages of unifying its entire product range. Hardly a month goes by without being marked by a new release. Latest to get the 'MX treatment' is Director. With a revamped interface, accessibility support, extended media handling and improved integration, Director MX has retained its positioning at the top of a short, but growing, list.

It would surprise many to know that Macromedia Director has been around for almost 20 years. In all that time, it has maintained its reputation as being the best toolset for delivering the richest multimedia content possible.

The latest MX version has been extended in its support for media, scripting and integration with other MX products. And even though the gap between Flash and Director is narrowing, the latter is at the higher level for extending content beyond the web, and should attract advanced Flash authors.

Interface and Integration

Users of other MX applications, such as Dreamweaver programmers, universally tell stories about the productivity of the panel and tab interface metaphor. Director has now been given this consistent interface and much need rationalisation. What was previously a fragmented and somewhat disjointed interface has now been turned into a slick, highly productive environment.

For example, the new Edit Panel provides quick access to object editing; double-click on any object to bring it into the appropriate tab ready for editing. It is all configurable, of course, so you may well set the bitmap editor as, says, Fireworks MX.

Director supports PNG files created by Fireworks seamlessly. Similarly, you can import SWF files generated by Flash, but Director stops short of allowing you to import the FLA source files.

Also, some variances in terminology exist. Whereas Flash and Freehand use Libraries and Instances, Director uses Casts and Sprites. I am sure Macromedia has a good reason for this (although I cannot imagine what it is, since it has a negative effect on the learning curve).

But I particularly like the new Project Publishing Panel, which really does streamline single-source output to different formats, such as the web or DVD.

All in all, the interface is a vast improvement and should be relatively easy to pick up, particularly for those already familiar with other Macromedia applications.

Media Support

Director has always been designed to handle the widest possible range of multimedia formats. Unique in the MX product range is its support for long format video and 3D elements.

New capabilities exist for audio and video RealMedia, Windows Media, AVI and QuickTime 6, including MPEG4 streaming. Support for these formats is extremely flexible and durable, and makes for a powerful publishing toolset.

The most exciting feature introduced in Director version 8.5 was support for Shockwave 3D. With Director MX, you can import 3D models, textures and animations from virtually any other package, and manipulate 3D elements using Lingo scripts (below). The extended 3D capabilities include physics awareness, particle system effects, bones animation, cartoon rendering and motion manipulation, and should attract authors of gaming applications, educational suites, and so on.

Perhaps the most important development within this new release is support for the pervasive DVD format. Using Macromedia's 'author once, publish anywhere' commitment, you can seamlessly output to DVD, as well as the usual CD, internet and kiosk platforms.

Applications such as Adobe Encore DVD and Apple DVD Studio already allow for multimedia authors to build DVD interfaces and interactive applications, although anything truly exciting in this area has yet to be achieved. We can now expect that to change with Director's ability to create cross-platform enriched DVD content; you have the ability to embed DVD movie playback inside projectors, trigger events during movie playback, control navigation, etc. If this is your bag, look no further than Director.

Behaviours and Scripting

What gives Director the edge is the way it allows you to bring media objects to life. This is done by assigning Behaviours to elements. Around 300 3D Behaviours were introduced in version 8.5 and these have been extended in the MX release, such as the commands for controlling QuickTime sprites. Access to Behaviours is now more intuitive, with alphabetised and categorised lists, a new Object Inspector, and greatly improved properly editing and debugging.

The supplied Behaviours will satisfy most requirements, although to really unlock the potential of 3D animation you need to get to grips with the dedicated programming language, Lingo. Good documentation and the improved interface handling I mentioned above, both serve to flatten the learning curve.

In any event, it is worth the journey, once you start taking real-time control of the new Flash MX objects. And if you are deploying on a ColdFusion server you have unlimited access to ColdFusion's server-side functionality (which, in the latest MX release, is considerable).

I cannot overstate how much power this gives you over installed devices, localised data and the whole Rich Internet Application ball-game.

Accessibility

Once the programming community had woken up to the fact that content had to be available to all, including those with special needs (which, by the way, was several years after they should have done) Flash's lack of accessibility support was cited as one of the main reasons for full accessibility being unachievable. In the last couple of years Macromedia has dispelled that myth and extended the accessibility of generated content to such an extent that it now genuinely leads from the front.

What the more astute programmers and Macromedia realise is that on the other side of accessibility lies heightened usability and efficiency. This is brilliantly evidenced in Director MX.

There are alternative methods of interaction to the mouse, of course, such as tabbing between objects. But the support for those with visual impairments excels. Essentially, this is in the form of a text-to-speech (TTS) engine that allows text associated with any sprite to be controlled fully. Importantly, this does not depend on a screen reader, but is embedded into the application itself. And, at last, speech can be synchronised with motion or captions and governed using dedicated Lingo commands.

This should impact on many, if not all, the projects you deliver. But it is essential with, say, kiosk applications.

Verdict

At first glance, the boundaries between Flash and Director may appear a little blurred. It is certainly true that Flash MX can deliver very powerful applications and would be suitable for most users. But Director continues to offer many capabilities that Flash lacks, such as long video, 3D and TTS, so you need to be careful about product selection.

If you need to author interactive multimedia and 3D applications for DVD or kiosks, Director is the only sensible choice.