Director was for many years the de facto production tool for the multimedia industry. Throughout the 1990s, it was responsible for creating the majority of educational CD-ROMs due to its range of features, relative ease of use, and the fact that it could create executables for both Apple and Microsoft operating systems.

The early 2000s saw Director slip off the radar of most multimedia professionals, superseded by stablemate Flash among others – you’d need to go back to Director 8.5 for the last significant upgrade. But now it’s back with version 11 – the first release in four years.

Adobe pitches Director 11 at three main target audiences: multimedia authors, e-learning developers and game developers. Version 8.5 added 3D capabilities to Director targeted at the games market, and version 11 aims to extend these by adding native DirectX 9 3D rendering and the Ageia (now Nvidia) PhysX engine to handle multiple-object collisions.

It uses a timeline-based approach that bears a passing resemblance to that of Flash CS3, and productions are put together using imported media, text and scripts. These scripts can be created using Director’s BASIC-like Lingo scripting language or an enhanced version of JavaScript that resembles ActionScript.

The most welcome improvements in this version are to the scripting interface. Director users spend most of their time working in the script editor, and being able to browse the list of available Lingo functions, and double-click to insert one, is a welcome improvement. However, these improvements are too little too late, and the script editor remains primitive compared with most other programming interfaces.

Director’s working environment has been slightly improved, too, with (finally) window docking and tabbed views, but this is hardly leading edge, and Adobe’s CS3-family interface is conspicuous by
its absence.

Indeed, this is an upgrade that feels as though it should be an incremental release. The ‘top ten new features’ list provided by Adobe includes support for new media types such as Quicktime 7, Windows Media and RealPlayer, support for Adobe’s Flash CS3 and Unicode, which makes the development of multilingual apps simpler – as long as you don’t want text that runs from right to left, that is.

Director MX 2004 added the ability to create deliverables for both Mac and PC from either platform, and version 11 extends this to include Intel-based Macs and full Vista compatibility. But this is where we start to run into problems.

To view Director content online, your audience needs the 4.5MB Shockwave plugin: a significant issue given that Shockwave 8.5 or later is installed on less than 50% of PCs.

Perhaps the biggest problem for Director, however, is that its position in the market overlaps that of Flash to such a degree there are few situations in which Director would be the first choice. Broadly speaking, it’s true to say Flash’s natural home is the internet, so if you’re developing a CD-ROM Director would seem to be the better choice.

However, its only real advantage over Flash is its native support for 3D, making it an ideal choice for 3D games – most of which are online anyway. To further muddy the water, Adobe’s AIR technology makes it possible to deploy Flash apps to the desktop, and there are many more being deployed on CD-ROM or for download than Director apps.

So, when it comes to delivering online, Flash is likely to be the better choice in the majority of situations.
For CD-ROM delivery, Flash is ideal for cross-platform delivery, and tools such as MatchWare’s Mediator 9 are much easier to use and more productive than Director for creating e-learning products.

The result is that Director 11 will only be of interest to a limited market made up of existing users, though they will undoubtedly appreciate the new support for recent file formats and platforms. And Director’s extended 3D capabilities make it a good choice for game prototyping and learning materials that make use of native 3D rendering.

But the cost is another big hurdle: for upgraders, $485 may well stick in the throat given the lack of genuinely new features, and $1615 for new users is outrageous.

Overall, Director 11 is a missed opportunity and the latest minor update to masquerade as an upgrade – it seems aimed at existing users, as it offers little to newcomers compared with competing products such as Adobe’s own Flash CS3. And for those who’ve switched to developing in the latter medium, there’s little to tempt them back.