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Shockwave is one of the internet's catchwords, and it's no wonder with the Shockwave player now being bundled as part of all AOL, Windows, Netscape, Internet Explorer and MacOS installations. In short, almost every computer capable of browsing the net can download, understand and play Shockwave content.
Now up to version 8, Director is still going strong, being one of the key authoring tools for animated web content, but in the home market at least, it has been overtaken by another Macromedia product, Flash, which is easier to use largely because it is far less complex.
In Director 8 there are a number of new features aimed at making Director movies quicker to construct. The most obvious change is the new property inspector. Much like the property inspector in Fireworks, this puts all your variables in one place, so if you need to make changes you can quickly locate and identify the fields that need tweaking.
This replaces many of the toolbars and palettes but, like Dreamweaver, Director still benefits from a large screen and you'll find a 17in monitor starting to feel somewhat cramped. We used a 21in monitor in our tests, which was great, but 19in would probably do fine for all but the most extensive use.
Selecting anything on the 'stage' (as the workspace is known) will display brief identifying details in a transparent box beneath, giving you immediate confirmation of what you have highlighted in a crowded working area. Director supports https, CGI form post and XML parsing, and uses MP3 compression for audio. A new feature is internal, selectable JPEG compression.
You can set an overall level of compression for all the elements in your movie as a whole, and then supplement this by defining specific compression settings for particular elements. You might, for example, want to apply a uniform level of 50 per cent compression to all elements, but then set your corporate logo to be displayed without compression and thus maintain a clean image.
Fireworks 3 is bundled, so it's not surprising that the bitmap tab of the property inspector includes a button to open Fireworks' image optimisation palette to handle images on an individual basis. The benefit of this is that it allows you to see the effect of the changes you are making, and compare these with the original image, all without the need to save them to disk first.
Macromedia has looked at the way users work and added grid lines to the workspace, which is somewhat reminiscent of desktop publishing software. This lets you align elements precisely on your page, and the point from which they are aligned will determine where they snap to the grid. Pick up an element in the upper left quarter, for example, and it is the top left corner that will snap to a grid line or intersection.
You can now zoom on a scale ranging from 12 per cent to 800 per cent for pixel-accurate element placement, and then pan your workspace by dragging it with the mouse. The main benefit of this is that by zooming out you can expose the blank pasteboard area around the edges of the stage. Any elements that start offstage, then get moved across and finish off the opposite side of the stage, can be easily manipulated even when not within the workspace by making use of the surrounding pasteboard.
The Internal Cast palette shows not only thumbnails of the images you are using in your production, but also representations of sounds and text. This is effectively the filing cabinet that holds everything in use at any time, and if thumbnails are not your thing, you can reorganise it as a list. The attributes displayed as part of the list are user-defined, and you can even add your own comments to each character either as a group or on an individual basis.
Seasoned Director developers will be well versed in Lingo, the suite's programming language. This is used to write 'behaviours', the actions that elements within your production undertake. If you are coming to Director anew, though, you'll welcome the addition of plain English programming, making it possible to use phrases along the lines of 'go to the menu' and still end up with a working presentation.
Keywords and attributes are colour-coded, even when you are using plain English, making it easy to navigate the various parts of your script. To save time, Director ships with over 100 pre-defined behaviours, so if programming is not your forte there's a good chance you'll be able to find everything you need already written.
Director 8 includes a 1000-user server application that lets you build community applications to run within your pages. In Director 7, this much-ignored addition ran to only 500 concurrent users. A good example of the use to which this might be put is in building a chat room, and Macromedia has included all the behaviours necessary to make this work without resorting to programming.
Once the various sections of your chat room have been drawn on the screen (text input field, name field, chat view and so forth) you simply drag the corresponding actions out of the library and drop them onto the various parts of your design. For example, the behaviour that connects the user to the server can be dragged onto the sprite you have designed to represent that action. All that is left for you to do is to fill in the fields that will let the browser locate the server and you're done. The user need then only click that button to connect, unaware of the coding that goes on behind the scenes to complete their connection.
The whole Director 8 Shockwave Studio package is Director, Fireworks 3, the Shockwave player, Soundforge XP and the Shockwave Multi-user Server 2 with a 1000-user licence. Unfortunately, however, this new version of Director is not backwards compatible - you cannot create Shockwave output for earlier versions of the player, so your users will have to upgrade to the latest version to see your new content.
Contact Computers Unlimited 020 8358 5857 www.macromedia.com
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