So here we have the granddaddy of multimedia authoring. I can remember playing with early versions of Director and liking it all right, but not being in love with it and not really caring for what was being produced with it. Last year, I got a hold of Macromedia Director 8.0, and all of that changed. With version 8, Macromedia did a serious revision of this hulking suite of authoring tools, tightened it up, brought in some usability features that almost made me cry and overhauled the workflow to make it about as easy to use as a graphics program, but retaining and expanding the robustness that gives the program its real power. Director 8.5 expands upon this even further with support for 3D, including physics; support for streaming Real Video and Real Audio; and integration with Macromedia Flash 5, just to name a few.

Now, I say all of this by way of introduction to Director because there's no way I can give a complete overview of the program. This is probably the most complex tool I've ever reviewed. I don't mean "complex" as in difficult to use; I mean "complex" as in where do you even start with a program that includes a 566-page scripting dictionary and a 597-page book covering just the stuff that's new since the last release? The manuals total 1,642 pages—2,056 if you count the manual for Fireworks 4, which is included with the suite.

In this first example, this Shockwave 3D object uses
a simple "camera orbit" and a "change cursor"
command. Both of these are simply a matter of
dragging a behavior onto an object. No coding.

I don't bring this up to make the program sound daunting; it's not. It's just that it was designed let you create literally anything—interactive Web content, stand-alone applications, games for distribution on CD-ROM, Web chat rooms, Web-based multiplayer games—really anything you can think of. This is a total authoring solution. If there's an application you can think of, you can probably create it in Director 8.5.

Studio components
The Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio includes Director 8.5, Fireworks 4, Shockwave Multiuser Server 3, the Shockwave 8.5 player and Bias Peak LE for audio editing on the Mac and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge XP for audio editing in Windows. The CD also includes media for getting started using the program, including sample 3D objects, as well as the four aforementioned bulky manuals. Mac and Windows versions are included in the same box.

Macromedia Fireworks is an image editing and Web graphics tool for doing everything from building graphics to compressing for the Web to creating interactive animations, such as button rollovers. (I've reviewed Macromedia Fireworks 4 separately, which you can read here.)

The Shockwave Multiuser Server 3 is an updated Shockwave server that allows up to 2,000 users to participate in multi-user Shockwave content simultaneously. This includes multi-user games, chat rooms, etc. This is actually twice the number of users allowed under the previous Shockwave Server. It supports server-side scripting and uses the UDP protocol for more efficient data delivery than was found in previous versions.

Both the Mac and Windows audio editing tools are "lite" versions of professional audio editors. They allow for limited functionality—basically enough to put together some audio before bringing it into Director 8.5.

What's new ... and not so new
Before we get into the new features of Director 8.5, I think I should expand on the concept of Director a little bit. A while back, there was a little bit of confusion in the market over the value of Director given that Flash was emerging as Web designers' favorite interactive development tool. "Why should we use Shockwave when we have Flash?" That was sort of the question on everybody's mind (everybody who cared to ponder such matters, anyway). Macromedia probably didn't help the situation much by giving Flash files the .swf extension (as in "Shockwave file") and Shockwave files the .dcr extension (as in Director).

So what's the difference? Director creates Shockwave files (.dcr), and Flash creates Flash files (.swf). They require different browser plugins for viewing on the Web, but both viewers enjoy pretty widespread distribution. (Macromedia says 200 million people have the Shockwave plugin for viewing Director files; in addition, the Shockwave viewer automatically downloads new components to allow users to view content that might be newer than their current viewer allows.) Both create interactive presentations for the Web. Both are capable of being distributed as standalone applications. (I bet you didn't know that about Flash.) And, particularly with the release of Flash 5, both offer some pretty powerful interactive features.

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