The Fate Of Director

Before I even start expressing my personal view, I just want to say that I love Director.

There's something to be said about the old school coding language Lingo that is Director and
its old school "32 or 24 bit image?" dialog question that is such an indication of its age today.

Fast forward to the present day, fast computer, real time simulations, and web videos everywhere.


It's all good, very good indeed, and still better things to come…Where does Director fit in all these ?

Sadly in all my experiences, I have to say that I simply cannot see how Director is the much sole after solution anymore. Everything Director can do, there's an application out there that can do just that and does a much better job simply because it was created for that very single purpose.

The "jack of all trades masters of none" attitude of Director is destroying itself from existence regardless of how glorified it used to be. It almost seems that Director's era started dying along with the "Multimedia CD-Rom" craze.

Allow me to elaborate why I believe Director is nearing its end, efficient/popular/usage wise.

For Director	Reality
Adobe Director makes interactive interface programming easy. Film Loop offers independent animation without taking up the score’s space.	Adobe Flash's concept of the Movieclip, the ease of creating the Movieclip and the ease of deploying it totally smack Director's linear timeline in the face. Sure Director can do the whole parent script thingy but why bother to do all that Lingo when you don't have to…in Flash ? In Flash, you focus more time on how to use the power of independent timelines instead of the time spend on creating one in the first place. Flash's movieclip and all the flexibility it encompasses make Director's film loop just about as interesting as a wet carrot. Director is SO user friendly that when you make a mistake, you had better make sure you undo it immediately cause it only allows a single step undo. Isn't it amazing! Like totally awesome !
Adobe Director was known for its Full screen video support in exe mode.	Flash's web capability, on the other hand, had revolutionaries web video, giving raise to the whole youtube bloom with all its fullscreen support in web mode. Flash as a projector can fullscreen too, and Adobe had announced on 20 August 2007 that they will eventually support the MPEG-4 international standard in the Flash Player itself.
Adobe Director's graphic format support rocks !	Let's talk fundamentals here, the most common thing for us to do is import graphics. Let's say a simple photoshop file with transparencies, to make sure Director handle the anti-alised outline correctly, I have to create a seperate grayscale image to tell director how to handle the transparencies, then engage the "mask" ink. The "Background Transparent" ink simply will not do as it's a "cheat" and it doesn't handle anti-alised graphic correctly. Adobe Flash on the other hand, handle it with grace, transparency data is simply imported along with the graphic without any extra work. This is what should had been expected, compared to this, I find Director's image transparency handling workflow unacceptable. What is even more outrageous is when I'm importing a graphic, it ask me whether I want to match the stage image bit or the imported image's bit depth data. Why would I want to import an image of a lesser depth and increase it's depth during import ? For the sake of increasing file size for fun and laughter ? I can understand if the image bit depth is higher than the stage and it ask me this question but when the imported bitmap's bit depth is lesser then the stage, I don't understand why Director still ask this question ! Not to mention that this is not even that important anymore in today's computer unless you're talking about floating point image formats. Flash simply don't ask questions like these.
Adobe Director can interface with the computer's serial port and things like that using a third party Xtra.	Flash can do the SAME thing using third party software.
Adobe Director offers real time 3D in the web.	This is Director's last stand, and as far as I’m concern, it's the only reason it's still standing. The support is extremely rudimentary, it doesn't even support animated texture ! I've seen some good games created using Director but again, there are programs out there created solely to do 3D games and the only reason Director is still holding up is due to its shockwave plugin penetration compare to its competitors. If Director doesn't do any more fundamental 3D support improvements beyond where version 8.5 left off, it's just a matter of time… By the way, at the present moment, people are writing APIs for flash to handle software rendering of 3D models, the support might not be native but the point is Director is no longer the one and only that it used to be.

Let's hope that Director stop behaving like a wanna-be, “jack of all trade master of none” old man that refuses to let the old order of things go, else its days are numbered.